Re: An extremely lazy proposal

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth Oliver Corff via:
> Reply-to:  Oliver Corff <oliver.corff@email.de>

This might not be the greatest of ideas.  An MUA might just decide 
to reply to you only, instead of to you and the list.

> Dear All,
>
> recently I compiled, and re-compiled, and again recompiled a set of
> various documents with different tables, equations etc.. For each of the
> documents, the precise requirements of preprocessors were different, and
> more often than not, I forgot to set the appropriate groff option when
> running the compilation to the effect that I had to redo my edit - check
> cycle. Since there is no groffer script anymore, may I humbly propose a
> new option to groff, namlely "-A" (mnemomic: [A]ll preprocessors) which
> forces all available preprocessors to be used? The penalty of this
> display of laziness is, in my eyes, minor: running a document against a
> preprocessor which is not needed does not do any harm I am aware of (I
> stand to be corrected in case there is such a situation), and since we
> talk only of a handful of preprocessors, not dozens, the overhead in CPU
> time should also be acceptable; all the more since -A would be invoked
> only in case of the presumed presence of any of tables, equations,
> pictures, reference lists.

There is such a situation, where running all available 
preprocessors can do harm:  soelim expands .so requests, but does 
so unconditionally, even if the .so is inside conditional text or 
a macro definition or whatnot.

I recently ran into this before noticing that groff’s -I option 
implies -s while trying OpenBSD’s remnant -mdoc (in 
/usr/src/share/tmac/mdoc).  Unlike Groff’s -mdoc, OpenBSD’s -mdoc 
does not indent the .so line in the definition of .Hf (which wraps 
.so).  And so soelim complained about not being able to find 
a file “\\$1.”