Re: Milestone reached: hyperlinked mdoc(7) documents in PDF

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth G. Branden Robinson:
> There may be some malformedness here complicating matters.

My example of .No Ar is not malformed: The No there is useless, 
yes, but that shouldn’t break anything.  The warning is a warning 
of the uselessness, not a warning of unspecifiedness.  I simply 
wanted to point toward Ar being called as argument to a different 
macro, disregarding what the exact macro is that is invoked 
directly and calls Ar.

What makewhatis(8) does (.Fl t Ar) might have been a better 
example, but wouldn’t have illustrated that the error is not in 
the .Fl t or in the .Ar invocation but in the /called/ Ar.  
I think.

> It's possible this is an error in a mandoc man page.  Unthinkable?  ;-)

I wouldn’t at all be surprised by what I’d call errors in the 
mandoc man pages, as I guess they aren’t tested a whole lot with 
more general troffs and the project calls mdoc not a macro package 
or the like, but its own language.

> At 2024-03-18T12:56:45-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > ...and in fact when I change line 9:
> >
> > -.No Ar
> > +.No \&Ar
> >
> > ...the applicable warnings from groff mdoc _and_ mandoc go away, and
> > the text formats as you would expect.
>
> The foregoing can be mostly disregarded.  I forgot that mdoc(7)'s `Ar`
> macro supplies its own "default arguments" in the absence of explicit
> ones, so it's okay to call it with none.

And that Ar is a macro that I want to call here.  `.No \&Ar` 
renders as one might expect, but not as one would expect if typing 
`.No Ar`.

> Do you find the attached "groffed" mandoc collection an improvement?

Yes.  Though Courier is as ugly as ever.  And the page numbers 
reset at the start of each section.  (“Section” being an older 
term for “man pages,” if memory serves right.)  Which they 
shouldn’t do—the book is one unit; it should get its own page 
numbers.  And in other books, you don’t usually see page numbers 
per chapter.

And on page 1 (See?  But I do indeed mean the first page of 
apropos(1).), in the second paragraph of the DESCRIPTION, you can 
see too much space after “Nm.”  That happens in a few places.  
Another place is, on the same page, “( expr  )” as the first tag 
of the tagged list at the end.

> (It still seems a little weird to me to follow `No` with `Ar`, but
> having just embarrassed myself with my mdoc(7) inexpertise, I'll
> withhold further opinion...)

Don’t worry, it would be weird to do that outside an example.