Re: [Groff] Applications of \c in man pages in the wild [LONG]

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Mon, May 01, 2017 at 12:15:55PM -0400:

> You mentioned deroff(1); GNU roff does not provide its own
> implementation of it, and Debian doesn't offer one.

Hugh?  Then what does the spell(1) utility call that is contained
in whatever base operating system you use?  I'm a bit surprised
that such basic tools might be missing anywhere, causing people to
search in the woods.

> Web searches aren't much help,

If you are desperate, try using the OpenBSD implementation,
it is very old, not under active development, and likely more
or less portable after you #define away the pledge(2) calls:

  https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/deroff/
  https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/spell/

Or you can use the mandoc implementation, contained in the
portable mandoc releases, called "demandoc(1)":

  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/ports.html
  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/man/demandoc.1.html
  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/snapshots/mdocml.tar.gz

It ought to be more or less compatible with deroff(1).

Yours,
  Ingo