Re: process man(7) (or any other package of macros) without typesetting

[Alejandro Colomar]

On 2023-08-17 21:12, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi Branden,
> 
> I've had this desire for a long time, and maybe now I have a strong
> reason to ask for it.
> 
> In the usual groff pipeline, you have something like
> 
>       $ preconv            foo.1     >foo.1.tbl
>       $ tbl               <foo.1.tbl >foo.1.eqn
>       $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1.eqn >foo.1.man
>       $ troff -Tutf8 -man <foo.1.man >foo.1.set
>       $ grotty -c         <foo.1.set >foo.1.cat
> 
> The problem is that at no point you can have the .roff source, after
> the man(7) macros have been expanded.  Would it be possible to split
> the groff(1) pipeline to have one more preprocessor, let's call it
> woman(1) (because man(1) is already taken), so that it translates
> man(7) to roff(7)?  I'd like to be able to do this:
> 
>       $ preconv            foo.1p      >foo.1p.tbl
>       $ tbl               <foo.1p.tbl  >foo.1p.eqn
>       $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1p.eqn  >foo.1p.man
>       $ woman -Tutf8      <foo.1p.man  >foo.1p.roff
>       $ troff -Tutf8      <foo.1p.roff >foo.1p.set
>       $ grotty -c         <foo.1p.set  >foo.1p.cat
> 
> With man(7) alone, it's already interesting to have this for
> debugging purposes.  But I envision a more useful thing: POSIX uses
> mm(7) for their manual pages.  Ideally, I'd like to keep their
> sources with minimal modification in man-pages-posix.  But of course,
> man(1) only understands man(7) and mdoc(7).  If we add a mm(1)
> program that is the mm(7) equivalent of woman(1), then I'd be able
> to install a preprocessed page, with the following pipeline, and
> man(1) should be able to render it, I guess:
> 
>       $ preconv            foo.1p     >foo.1p.tbl
>       $ tbl               <foo.1p.tbl >foo.1p.eqn
>       $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1p.eqn >foo.1p.man
>       $ mm -Tutf8         <foo.1p.man >foo.1p.roff

Oops, I meant:

>       $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1p.eqn >foo.1p.mm
>       $ mm -Tutf8         <foo.1p.mm  >foo.1p.roff

>       $ install            foo.1p.roff /usr/man/man1p/foo.1p
> 
> Does it sound reasonable to you?
> 
> Cheers,
> Alex
> 
>