Re: [Groff] groff man page blank

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> I installed groff-1.18.1 on Solaris 8.0 and Tru64 (Digital UNIX) 5.1
> both using GNU compiler and make.
> 
> But I can't see groff's man page anymore:
>   $ man groff
>   Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done
>   $
> 
> However, I can view other man pages like grops, grog
> 
> Does anyone know why?


Solaris man uses "nroff" to format the manual pages.  If your
groff installation does not provide a nroff (in a directory
that comes before /bin in PATH), Solaris nroff gets used,
but chokes on the groff extensions in the groff manual page.
The grops manual page is relatively "clean".

What you could do is to provide your own "nroff" as a link
to gnroff.

nroff is called with argument "-man".  However, the way
groff gets installed, "-man" uses Suns' manual page macros
in *compatibility mode*, so it chokes, too.  You might try
to substitute "-man-old" (which uses the groff manpage
macros), but I decided this was also too much trouble.
I "solved" the problem by simply providing preformatted
manual pages for all groff-related stuff:

----------------------------------------------------------------
for file in man/man*/*
do
  name=`basename $file`
  sec=`echo $name | cut -d. -f2`
  groff -man-old -Tascii $file >/usr/local/man/cat$sec/$name
done
----------------------------------------------------------------

(We install programs each in their own directories, and
then simply create symbolic links from /usr/local/bin,
/usr/local/man/man*, etc. to the files in those installation
directories.  Then I can call the above routine in the groff
installation directory and be sure it involves only groff's
manual pages.)