Re: [Groff] extended font macro

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Larry,

Larry Kollar wrote on Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 10:06:13AM -0500:

> .de FILE
> .FONT CB \\$1 R \&. CI \\$2
> ..
> .FILE name ext

I fully agree that structural markup is usually more useful than
physical markup; however, man(7) does not have any structural
markup macros so far, so it's not a good idea to start adding
structural markup like .FILE to man(7) now.

Of course that doesn't apply to the idea of .FONT, which would still
be physical markup.

If people want structural markup in manuals, they use mdoc(7).

> Yes, the humble manpage format has escaped the confines of *roff?
> so any extensions have to be considered carefully.

Yes, according to what i know, man(7) was first implemented
outside *roff by Henry Spencer in 1991 (awf), and mdoc(7)
was first implemented outside *roff by Kristaps Dzonsons
in 2008 (mandoc); for details, see:

  http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

However, that's not the main problem.  I don't think that awf/cawf
are actively maintained and i'm not aware of other man(7) parsers,
and Kristaps and myself could implement man extensions in mandoc(1);
actually, mandoc(1) already supports part of man-ext even though we
don't like it and don't see the point.

What i'm concerned about is traditional roff.
If you extend man, a few people will start using these extensions
in their new manuals, so you gratuitiously make life harder for
people trying to still support platforms using traditional roff
variants that don't have these extensions.

Yours,
  Ingo