Re: dired-man can't deal with compressed pages

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Juri Linkov <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 21:03:02 +0200
> 
> I agree that this will not work for man who don't have the -l option.
> On the other hand, man with the -l option should take the advantage of
> this option.  So I think a good solution is to let users to choose
> the command line they want, like in the patch below.

The canonical Emacs solution to such situations is to try running
`man' with the -l switch and see if it barfs.

> I think it's better not to duplicate what man already does.

`man' doesn't do what we want except where it supports -l.

> Users can construct the command line as they want.

FWIW, I wouldn't give up on users without "man -l" so easily, but
that's me.

> Blindly running the file through all preprocessors will fail if some
> preprocessor is not installed.

??? Is that even possible?  I thought all the preprocessors we need
(eqn, tbl, refer, and soelim) are always installed as part of the
standard Troff/Groff/man packages.  How else would users be able to
format the pages they have?

> > Yet another possible solution is to use functions from woman.el, which
> > IIRC has a special command to format a single file.  However, I don't
> > remember how well it supports various preprocessors.
> 
> There is already a dired binding to `W' key in woman.el.
> So users desiring a woman can get her with this key.

Then perhaps dired-x should suggest using it on systems which don't
support "man -l", if the file at point requires that.