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.”