Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Greg Minshall]

Ken,

> >This seems like the sort of thing that should be possible to
> >automate, and that question has been raised before.  A quick search
> >turned up the following, among others:
> >
> >   
> > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13433903/convert-all-linux-man-pages-to-text-html-or-markdown
> >   https://jeromebelleman.gitlab.io/posts/publishing/manpages/
> 
> I am ... concerned about depending on pandoc, because of this:
> 
>   Pandoc is available in lxplus, aiadm and most RPM repositories. It's
>   written in Haskell, which means it relies on hundreds of megabytes
>   of library dependencies.

i think the "man to asciidoc" conversion would be a one-time thing.
then, maintain the files in asciidoc format, convert to man files at
build time.

[NB: i'm not claiming asciidoc is the right "light-weight markup
language" to choose.  i don't really know.  it just seems reasonable
enough to me.  though, probably choosing any of the options, such as
asciidoc or markdown, in the future converting to some other isn't "much
more" than an awk script.  [my awk-fu is still okay.]]

after the initial conversion, and then shipping, there will be lots of
"fix the tables in foo.1" to do.  i.e., the quality of the
*presentation* in the man pages will suffer, though the quality of the
information shouldn't, more than a delta or two.  it's not *my* code, so
it's easy for me to say, but ...

cheers, Greg