Re: [Groff] gkurz, a short introduction for german users

[Nick Stoughton]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 19:39 +0200, Axel Kielhorn wrote:
> Why is .mso de.tmac preferred over .so de (I assume the tmac should
> be 
> omitted, right?) If it works with -m it should work with .so, or did
> I 
> miss something? 

You missed something!

.so file

will include "file" ... if the file starts with a "/", then it is an
absolute path, if it doesn't then it is either relative to the current
directory or to the list of paths given in the -I option. It knows
nothing inherently about the path to the tmac files etc. It knows
nothing about extensions. So, you *could* say

.so /usr/local/share/groff/1.19.3/tmac/de.tmac

but that would be wrong if you installed it in a different place.

.mso de.tmac

looks in the macro directory. It DOES know about filename extensions, so
you could say

.mso de

Here's what the info page says about the two:

 -- Request: .so file
     Read in the specified FILE and includes it in place of the `so'
     request.  This is quite useful for large documents, e.g. keeping
     each chapter in a separate file.  *Note gsoelim::, for more
     information.

     Since `gtroff' replaces the `so' request with the contents of
     `file', it makes a difference whether the data is terminated with
     a newline or not: Assuming that file `xxx' contains the word `foo'
     without a final newline, this


          This is
          .so xxx
          bar

     yields `This is foobar'.

     The search path for FILE can be controlled with the `-I' command
     line option.

 -- Request: .mso file
     Identical to the `so' request except that `gtroff' searches for
     the specified FILE in the same directories as macro files for the
     the `-m' command line option.  If the file name to be included has
     the form `NAME.tmac' and it isn't found, `mso' tries to include
     `tmac.NAME' and vice versa.