On Saturday, 15 February 2020 23:45:16 GMT Jeff Conrad wrote: > > Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2020 8:01 AM > > > > It's non-portable because that other person might use a man(7) formatter > > that doesn't support .am or .pdfbookmark, or not in the same way as groff. > > > > > What's far more nonstandard ... > > > > Yes, that is very evil. Never try to be clever in manual page source > > code. Strictly stick to what man(7) documents. > > > > Individual manual pages are not the place to develop new formatting > > features. > > I neglected to mention that the page is for a very specialized command > and is unlikely to exist in other than PDF format except on my system. > Everyone using it so far is running Windows, so no one is likely to say > "man <program>". It's in man(7) format mainly as a convenience. It's > obvious, perhaps, that it should not be distributed for installation in > a normal man directory (unless perhaps already formatted). > > Perhaps man(7) format wasn't the best choice, but it was a quick (and > perhaps dirty) way to provided some documentation that might not > otherwise have been provided. A couple of people mentioned the lack of > bookmarks, which does seem pretty lame for 2020. Perhaps a better > alternative would be to rewrite the page in texinfo to avoid confusion, > though in this context, I'm not sure the effort is justified. And I > suppose someone might complain that there's no info, which I don't have > and cannot test. > > Many of my man pages include extensions like those in an-ext.tmac; some > have the same names but behave differently. Some of these go back 30 > years when an-ext.tmac didn't exist, so I really didn't have a choice. > Perhaps that's now not good, but I don't have a great urge to go back > and update everything. In most cases, this works to no great evil > because most of the commands are only for my use. But I guess I should > be careful to provide formatted versions the few times I send them to > others. > > Anyway, thanks for the observation, which I might have not thought of > (one person did ask about a Linux port). Using the MKS environment, I > sometimes forget that most *nix environments have diverged considerably > from mine in the last 15 years (the MKS man command doesn't appear to > format anything, expecting formatted files to reside in */cat? directories > as on most Unix systems long ago). > > Jeff
Hi Jeff, Given your use case, wanting to provide a pdf which documents a specialsed command for windows users, you might like to try running it through the attached program as a pre- processor before calling groff. I.E.:- pdfman <your_man_page.file> | groff -Tpdf -k -mandoc > your_man_page.pdf (Add your extra personal macros as required). You can see an example of the sort of documents this produces by pointing your browser at:- http://chuzzlewit.co.uk/WebManPDF.pl/man:/7/groff_mdoc I hope this is useful. Cheers Deri
pdfman
Description: Perl program
