On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 19:39 +0200, Axel Kielhorn wrote:
> Why is .mso de.tmac preferred over .so de (I assume the tmac should
> be
> omitted, right?) If it works with -m it should work with .so, or did
> I
> miss something?
You missed something!
.so file
will include "file" ... if the file starts with a "/", then it is an
absolute path, if it doesn't then it is either relative to the current
directory or to the list of paths given in the -I option. It knows
nothing inherently about the path to the tmac files etc. It knows
nothing about extensions. So, you *could* say
.so /usr/local/share/groff/1.19.3/tmac/de.tmac
but that would be wrong if you installed it in a different place.
.mso de.tmac
looks in the macro directory. It DOES know about filename extensions, so
you could say
.mso de
Here's what the info page says about the two:
-- Request: .so file
Read in the specified FILE and includes it in place of the `so'
request. This is quite useful for large documents, e.g. keeping
each chapter in a separate file. *Note gsoelim::, for more
information.
Since `gtroff' replaces the `so' request with the contents of
`file', it makes a difference whether the data is terminated with
a newline or not: Assuming that file `xxx' contains the word `foo'
without a final newline, this
This is
.so xxx
bar
yields `This is foobar'.
The search path for FILE can be controlled with the `-I' command
line option.
-- Request: .mso file
Identical to the `so' request except that `gtroff' searches for
the specified FILE in the same directories as macro files for the
the `-m' command line option. If the file name to be included has
the form `NAME.tmac' and it isn't found, `mso' tries to include
`tmac.NAME' and vice versa.
