RE: man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Jeff Conrad]

Ingo,

> From: Ingo Schwarze [mailto:address@hidden]
> Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2020 2:26 PM

Free Software?
--------------
> Oh.  Seeing you ask a question about the formatting of a manual page
> on a public list concerned with free software, i jumped to the conclusion
> that you wanted to publish this page as a part of some free software
> package.  Sorry for that.  Of course there is nothing wrong with using
> free software in any way that is convenient for private purposes.

Well, I make the program available for free to anyone who wants it (it's
not exactly a high-demand item; it calculates illuminance from the Sun
and Moon).  And untold hours of help using it.  It could end up as free
software; at present, I'm not sure the code is ready for prime time.
It's not exactly bad code, but it looks, shall we say, inelegant
compared to what's in the groff package.

The interest so far in the scientific community who use it has been for
something in Python or R; perhaps not a bad idea, but having little
facility in the former and none in the latter, I won't be the one to do
it.

texinfo
-------
> And at this point, the man(7) language is better maintained and appears
> to have more of a future than texinfo, which has been a lame duck now
> for at least half a decade, probably longer:
> 
>   https://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg08172.html

The big advantage texinfo has is very extensive links, including
bookmarks, cross-references, and clickable index entries.  I chose to
add some of this capability to a man page; the "page" is 35 pages long,
and the program has 42 options, so it's pretty unwieldy without modern
navigational aids (some might consider it unwieldy even with the aids).
Perhaps I just need to regard it as a "man page" in name only.

MKS man(1) and groff
--------------------
> > ... (the MKS man command doesn't appear to format anything,
> > expecting formatted files to reside in */cat? directories as on most
> > Unix systems long ago).

> Heh.  That's one man(1) implementation i have most likely never seen.
> They even provide a fairly details reference manual online:
> 
>   https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/man.1.asp
> And indeed, below FILES, it says:
> 
>   man[0-9]/*.[0-9]
>     unformatted reference pages.
>     Note:
>        Unformated reference pages are not currently supported.
>        Reference pages stored in these directories are treated
>        as pre-formatted pages.

It doesn't quite work like this ... formatted pages only work in the
cat* directories.  In the man* directories, they're met with contempt.
I have a support request in ...

Apparently the cat* directories have long gone by the wayside.  It's
been a while since I've used a real Unix system; in the early 1990s with
HP-UX, formatted man pages were kept in the cat* directories.  By
default, pages weren't formatted until first called for with man(1); in
those days, a page could take 30 seconds to format.  We'd run /etc/
catman after every update to format all the pages so the users wouldn't
need to wait; the process usually took a few hours.  And the formatted
pages--complete with character-backspace pairs--took a lot of disk
space.  Things have obviously changed ...

> But this page lists groff:
> 
>   https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/cmd_index.asp
> 
> So the tools are there, and the gap shouldn't be too hard to close
> for you!  ;-)

But they haven't actually provided groff for years, at least for the
entry-level Toolkit version I have.  And it was an ancient version even
when they did.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
--------------------------------
Anyway, thanks to everyone for the helpful suggestions.  Had I known
about Deri's pdfman, I probably wouldn't have bothered with what I've
done here.  Of course, that would not have eliminated the previous evil
macros that I've had for ages :-)

Jeff