Hi Carlos, At 2023-04-22T16:46:00-0400, Carlos wrote: > On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:00:34PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > At 2023-04-22T12:36:51-0400, Carlos wrote: > > > How am I supposed to give you an example? > > > > For a guy who likes manually constructing pipelines, Ralph seems > > inordinately disinterested in the intermediate stages when > > troubleshooting. ;-) > > > > Unfortunately the PostScript output you've been sharing is not terribly > > helpful; please hold off for now. Your "nroff -man | cat -n" output is > > the most telling clue we have so far, in my opinion. > > Sure. But no one's sure of the cause of the blank page. > > If you had to guess, what would it be?
At present my guess is a loose blank line in your /etc/groff/man.local.
> > It might be worth comparing the /etc/groff/man.local files in both
> > your main distribution (which you haven't identified) and Alpine
> > Linux.
>
> I'll check.
>
> If on the other hand, I were to compare the stats from groff and
> the other spare machine where no blank page is injected, then it'd
> alnost be like cheating the way out to find the cause, which is not
> fair either for a blank page. Just joking. But I'll check.
>
> It's interesting nonetheless.
[...]
> > The groff_man(7) man page will tell you exactly where the man.local
> > file is installed. View the man page and scroll down to the "Files"
> > section.
>
> Did you mean groff man(7) or roff or man(7) man. Sorry but I couldn't
> find the section or subsection titled Files
I mean groff_man(7) with the underscore.
$ MANWIDTH=72 man groff_man | sed -n '/^FILES/,/^NOTES/p'
FILES
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/man.tmac
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an.tmac
These are wrapper files to call andoc.tmac.
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/andoc.tmac
This brief groff program detects whether the man or mdoc
macro package is being used by a document and loads the
correct macro definitions, taking advantage of the fact
that pages using them must call .TH or .Dd, respec‐
tively, as their first macro. Because the wrappers
above load this file, a man program or user typing, for
example, “groff -man page.1”, need not know which pack‐
age the file page.1 uses. Multiple man pages, in either
format, can be handled.
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an-old.tmac
Most man macros are contained in this file. It also
loads the GNU extensions from an-ext.tmac (see below).
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an-ext.tmac
The extension macro definitions for .SY, .OP, .YS, .TQ,
.EX/.EE, .UR/.UE, and .MT/.ME are contained in this
file, which is written in classic troff and permissively
licensed—not copylefted. Man page authors concerned
about portability to legacy Unix systems are encouraged
to copy these definitions into their pages, and main‐
tainers of troff implementations or work‐alike systems
that format man pages are encouraged to re‐use them.
Note that the definitions for these macros are read af‐
ter the call of .TH, so they will replace any macros of
the same names preceding it in your file. If you use
your own implementations of these macros, they must be
defined after calling .TH to have any effect.
/usr/share/groff/site-tmac/man.local
Local changes and customizations should be put into this
file.
NOTES
(On my Debian system, /usr/share/groff/site-tmac is a symbolic link to
/etc/groff. Nothing wrong with that.)
Regards,
Branden
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