Re: [Groff] [groff] modern xman?

[James K. Lowden]

On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:31:13 -0500
Doug McIlroy <address@hidden> wrote:

> > if only there were a viewer designed for dealing with, oh, dvi or
> > ps.
> Unless I've missed the point entirely, why not a trivial
> shell script using, say, gv? 

That works up to a point.  In the general case, the script would
have to do everything man(1) does, dealing with MANPATH and so on.
That's 1041 lines of C on NetBSD.  Whether or not that's "trivial" is a
matter of definition.  ;-)

Then, tools like xdvi and gs are really paper emulators, not browsers.
It would be nice if links worked and history were kept.  That presents
some challenges because the notion of "link" doesn't exist in troff
proper, nor in the man/mdoc macros, and not in e.g. dvi at all.  

--jkl