Re: [Groff] conditional logic based on device?

[Clarke Echols]

If you are using tty output to a user display, the man command
normally uses nroff (at least that's the way it was when I was
responsible for man pages at HP).

You can use the requests:

>     .if n         \" for nroff processing input

and

>     .if t         \" for troff/groff processing input

Of course the code has to be enclosed within \{ and \} pairs for
each .if condition.

I'm not certain whether this is what you're looking for or not...

Historically speaking, nroff has been the exclusive processor for
displayed man pages.  troff was used only for typesetting printed
paper pages.

Clarke


Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
> Is there a way I can mark up a certain chunk of groff code/markup
> so that it's used only for a particular device but not for others?
>
> The context of my question is this: For man-page output from the
> DocBook XSL Stylesheets, I have them outputting some hacky
> instances of \h escapes with negative values, in order to deal
> with some horizontal spacing problems in console output. (I'll
> admit there may be better ways of dealing with these particular
> spacing problems, but that's how I'm dealing with them now...)
>
> Because those instances screw up the formatting in PS output, what
> I'd like to do if possible is to wrap those \h escapes in
> conditionals so that they have effect only in console output, but
> not when generating PS output. So I'm wondering if there's a way I
> can do that.
>
>   --Mike