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Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 22:55:16 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT elta DOT co DOT il>
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	(RadSurfer AT yahoo DOT com)
Subject: Re: Linux Man-Pages
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> From: RadSurfer AT yahoo DOT com (Radical NetSurfer)
> Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
> Date: 19 Jan 2004 02:52:34 -0800
> 
> No need for all that additional overhead

What overhead?

> My goal of creating a simple viewer of Linux Man-Pages has been
> obtained however!  Totally self-contained, and without any
> fancy-smancy non-sense either!

I don't know how the entire troff language with Groff extensions can
be handled in a small self-contained utility: it is a very large
language.  I'm guessing that you only support a small subset of the
features; try some of the unformatted man pages in the Groff
distribution to feel what I'm talking about.  Or just page through
the Groff manual which describes all the features, and see how many
of them are there.

And then there are pages that need preprocessing with `soelim', `tbl',
`pic', `refer', etc., and gobs of macro packages routinely relied upon
by many man pages.  It sounds like a gross waste of energy to reinvent
all that stuff just to make a single program that doesn't rely on
other programs.

As for viewing already formatted pages, Less does it already and gives
you lots of additional features of a decent pager, like emulation of
fonts with colors; again, no need to reinvent the wheel.

So about all the `man' clone from man13b.zip does is to search the
MANPATH, figure out what command needs to be run to format a given
page (by reading its first line), supports semi-fancy searches of man
directory hierarchies, and gives some graceful treatment to man pages
whose file names were truncated to the DOS 8+3 limits.