[Groff] Re: groff 1.19.1 complains when formatting its own man pages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Here's another idea: have compatibility mode apply more "statically"
> than "dynamically".  That is, if \n[.C] is 1, then ".de XX" should
> should cause XX to be executed in compatibility mode, restoring the
> old compatibility mode when it exits.  (This is sort of the inverse
> of ".de1 XX".)  Similarly for ".ds".

A good suggestion, but I fear it doesn't help for our particular
problem, namely to format groff.1 correctly within Sun's default groff
setup.  In UNIX troff versions of the man macros, the definition of,
say, `.B' could look like this:[*]

  .de B
  \fB\\$1 \\$2 \\$3 \\$4 \\$5 \\$6 \\$7 \\$8 \\$9\fP
  ..

With groff you aren't limited to nine arguments:

  .B This is a long text with many arguments written in boldface.

So while we can probably fix the syntactical obstacles, we can't fix
the way UNIX troff macros are programmed.


    Werner


[*] This is actually an unrealistic example, but you get the idea.