[Groff] LL Usage in an-old.tmac Incompatible with man Program on GNU/Linux

[Keith Marshall]

The `man' program, which I believe is currently used in the majority of 
GNU/Linux distros, claims, as indicated by its own `manpage', to adjust the 
displayed width of the formatted output to fit the width of the console; it 
does this by injecting a `.ll' request into the nroff input stream, something 
along the lines of:--

        (echo .ll 12.7i; /bin/cat /usr/man/man1/groff.1) | nroff -mandoc

This used to work perfectly, with groff-1.17.x, but some recent changes in 
an-old.tmac, (I'm not sure at which point it occurred), have broken this; 
specifically, the initialisations:

        .ie n .nr LL 78n
        :
        .ll \\n[LL]u

override the injected `.ll' request, forcing an output line length of 78n, 
regardless of the width of the console display.

Looking in an-old.tmac, it would seem that the LL register is mostly 
redundant;  it is only ever used *once* in the above `.ll' initialisation, 
which appears within the `TH' macro.  Thus, it could probably be dispensed 
with altogether;  however, if it is deemed worthwhile to retain it, this 
patch will restore the behaviour expected by `man'...

Index: tmac/an-old.tmac
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/groff/groff/tmac/an-old.tmac,v
retrieving revision 1.51
diff -u -r1.51 an-old.tmac
--- tmac/an-old.tmac    26 May 2005 21:02:01 -0000      1.51
+++ tmac/an-old.tmac    12 Aug 2005 22:38:58 -0000
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@
 .nr need_eo_h 0
 .
 .if !r LL \{\
-.  ie n .nr LL 78n
+.  ie n .nr LL \n[.l]
 .  el   .nr LL 6.5i
 .\}
 .if !r LT \

Best regards,
Keith.