Werner LEMBERG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2008-02-23 09:31 +0100: > > What I mean is that I'd like to be able to do something like this: > > > > For more information, see the \n[troff]Description\n[troff] > > \n[nroff]DESCRIPTION\n[nroff] section. > > There are no inline conditionals in groff. You would rather define a > macro like this: > > .de t-or-n > . ie t \ > . nop \\$1 > . el \ > . nop \\$2 > .. > > Then you can say > > For more information, see the > .t-or-n Description DESCRIPTION > section.
I've run into a problem with using a request like that for certain cases (see below). So I'm wondering if there is really now way I can do this using escapes instead. Could a redefine some existing escapes? Or redefine a certain font? (What I mean is, redefine it so that if I wrap something in a particular pair of escapes, it doesn't get displayed in TTY output, and another pair that doesn't get displayed for non-TTY). The particular problem I run into with using a request for this is that when the term I wanted to have alternative strings for is immediately preceded and/or followed by a punctuation mark. For example, a user might have DocBook source (which my app needs to convert to groff source) like this: <para>For more information, see the preceding section (<xref linkend="desc"/>) or the <xref linkend="intro"/> section for this document.</para> So when I generate groff source from that -- which includes dereferencing the <xref> instances to get the title of the sections they points to (e.g. "Description") -- I get: .PP For more information, see the preceding section ( .t-or-n "Description" "DESCRIPTION" ) or the .t-or-n "Introduction" "INTRODUCTION" section for this document. And if I then view the rendered output of that, I get: For more information, see the preceding section ( Description ) or the Introduction section for this document. That is, an undesirable wordspace gets inserted after the between the parens before and after the word "Description". Hence my question about whether there really is no way I could use a set of escapes instead of a request... --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://people.w3.org/mike/ http://sideshowbarker.net/
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