Guys, It's been too long. What would I use to compile this man page source? I do remember some option switches are required. Yes? Thanks On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 1:49 PM Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> wrote: -- End of line JOB TERMINATED -->> Okey Dokey, OK Boss

On Wednesday, 28 June 2023 at 14:38:40 -0400, Clem Cole wrote: There's also grog (groff guess) that may help. It's not very clever, but it recognizes a number of formats: $ grog ls.1 groff -mdoc ls.1 Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

The primary macro packages I see come up between Bell and UCB are man, ms, mm, and me. Man of course finds use in the manual pages (although there are different representations of manpages in nroff over time.) From what I've seen (someone who was there can surely correct me) it seems that ms macros were more commonly used on the research side of things while the mm macros proliferated more in the supported side. Finally the me macros were a BSD component. Given these separations, the origin of or relative vicinity from which a paper originates provides much context as to which macros may be present. To a finer point, the papers published with V7 are ms macros papers while the new additions in PWB lineages are mm macros, while some papers that crop up in BSD likely use me (although I haven't gotten too far into BSD with doc research yet.) Papers from UNIX consumers such as universities are likely in ms or me most of the time. On the flip side, mm was the macro package touted with Documenter's Workbench, so many commercial operations using System V for documentation would've produced documents in mm. I'd be curious whether the earlier "Phototypesetter" package included ms or mm (or both.) I don't think I've seen a "papers" set with both the Lesk ms document and the Smith and Mashey mm one, so couldn't say how common both in the same Bell offering were. Additionally, my research hasn't touched on any officially sanctioned use of mm in BSD, so that's an area ripe for some more study. As for other breadcrumbs, Bell mm macros papers do often include a comment at the top indicating to print with nroff -mm or mm(1). I don't recall seeing similar in research papers, but haven't necessarily gone looking. In any case, the paper sets with UNIX itself typically had scripts included with the necessary command-lines, as many papers additionally needed some eqn and/or tbl processing. I imagine any other such formally distributed document sources would likewise include scripts in lieu of commentary, but it depends. - Matt G.

Perhaps you are referring to 'doctype'?

It is doctype. It's still alive (as an rc/grep/awk) script in Plan 9 and descendants. Andrew Hume <andrew(a)humeweb.com> wrote:

At 2023-06-29T06:27:44+0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote: Setting aside the well known bifurcation between man(7) and mdoc(7), which manage to stay out of each other's way in the macro name space, I'm not aware of any comparative survey of different man(7) implementations. Ultrix at some point--I have no insight into the chronology of it--had a large set of extensions that remains quietly documented and supported by groff to this day, albeit off in a corner where it seems to receive little attention. (Just as well, in my opinion, as not all of its innovations are worthy of embrace.) As far as other vendor extensions and developments go, I have collected all of the information known to me into the groff_man(7) page in the any-minute-now groff 1.23.0 release. Here are the relevant sections. (There are two because concept and implementation are distinguishable.) History M. Douglas McIlroy designed, implemented, and documented the AT&T man macros for Unix Version 7 (1979) and employed them to edit the first volume of its Programmer's Manual, a compilation of all man pages supplied by the system. That man supported the macros listed in this page not described as extensions, except .P and the deprecated .AT and .UC. The only strings defined were R and S; no registers were documented. .UC appeared in 3BSD (1980). Unix System III (1980) introduced .P and exposed the registers IN and LL, which had been internal to Seventh Edition Unix man. PWB/UNIX 2.0 (1980) added the Tm string. 4BSD (1980) added lq and rq strings. SunOS 2.0 (1985) recognized C, D, P, and X registers. 4.3BSD (1986) added .AT and .P. Ninth Edition Research Unix (1986) introduced .EX and .EE. SunOS 4.0 (1988) added .SB. The foregoing features were what James Clark implemented in early versions of groff. Later, groff 1.20 (2009) originated .SY/.YS, .TQ, .MT/.ME, and .UR/.UE. Plan 9 from User Space's troff introduced .MR in 2020. Authors The initial GNU implementation of the man macro package was written by James Clark. Later, Werner Lemberg supplied the S, LT, and cR registers, the last a 4.3BSD-Reno mdoc(7) feature. Larry Kollar added the FT, HY, and SN registers; the HF string; and the PT and BT macros. G. Branden Robinson implemented the AD and MF strings; CS, CT, and U registers; and the MR macro. Except for .SB, the extension macros were written by Lemberg, Eric S. Raymond, and Robinson. This document was originally written for the Debian GNU/Linux system by Susan G. Kleinmann. It was corrected and updated by Lemberg and Robinson. The extension macros were documented by Raymond and Robinson. I welcome any further insights people can offer. This man page isn't the best place to document extensions that withered on the vine (like Eighth/Ninth Edition Research Unix's addition of multi-column macros for man(7)), but I wouldn't mind collecting such things into some sort of auxiliary article. While the mandoc(1)/mdocml project's "History of UNIX Manpages"[1] is an invaluable resource, it doesn't really do what's written on the tin, and serves more as a history of (some) *roff _formatters_--not of the man(7) language. I assume that this stance is in part due to the unease bordering on antipathy that mandoc(1) proponents have for the man(7) macro package. In their view, everybody should be writing mdoc(7). Unfortunately this lacuna has left useful historical information about the man(7) package uncollected. Regards, Branden [1] https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

At 2023-06-29T09:47:50+1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: I won't claim that grog is more clever now, but as of groff 1.23.0 it is[1] avowedly less buggy. It is also 52% of its former size (by `wc -l`), has 14 bug fixes since groff 1.22.4 (with only a wish list item remaining), sports an automated test suite, and the tool itself can now be conveniently passed around as a single file--so I'm attaching it. Regards, Branden [1] Will be. We're up to release candidate 4 now. https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/groff/

Rich Salz wrote in &lt;CAFH29toi4aFfGY7g+SndAPz6ndjk8j+LKZOGfnd2GQGnrNXKhw(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;om>: |A perl script to inuit likely roff options as definitely a neat Unix hack. The "problem" is that the "shebang" line used for UNIX man'uals on at least a few ("newer" <> post Y2K) systems has never been extended in plain *roff terms, for general macro things. Ie that For example, newer man(1)s read the first line of the manual and check for a syntax <^'\" >followed by concat of [egprtv]+ (and in fact *join in* $MANROFFSEQ environment [egprtv]+) while getopts 'egprtv' preproc_arg; do case "${preproc_arg}" in e) pipeline="$pipeline | $EQN" ;; g) GRAP ;; # Ignore for compatibility. p) pipeline="$pipeline | $PIC" ;; r) pipeline="$pipeline | $REFER" ;; t) pipeline="$pipeline | $TBL" ;; v) pipeline="$pipeline | $VGRIND" ;; *) usage ;; esac Of course, most roff's do not have that "super process" that groff actually is, for one, so you have to formulate pipelines anyway. And then roff is dead for the young. Generally speaking. It is only a pity in my opinion because the most widely used implementation (GNU roff) actually does "magic" already and anyway, namely in its preconv(1), which does preconv tries to find the input encoding with the following algorithm. ... 2. Otherwise, check whether the input starts with a Byte Order Mark (BOM, see below). If found, use it. 3. Otherwise, check whether there is a known coding tag (see below) in either the first or second input line. If found, use it. ... 5. If everything fails[.] And 3. is then [.]supports the coding tag convention (with some restrictions) as used by GNU Emacs and XEmacs[.] ... .\" -*- mode: troff; coding: latin-2 -*- But possibly the future brings not only integrative and truthful western white men, but also a roff which "can". The former i doubt, the latter i can still hope for. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)