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From: RadSurfer AT yahoo DOT com (Radical NetSurfer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Linux Man-Pages
Date: 22 Jan 2004 19:44:14 -0800
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

But imagine my delight at what new understanding I'll
have of the more-commonly-used Groff commands...hehe.
And the mere delight at how very easy it is to handle
these fundamental scripts.
URL's are easily handled (up to and including launching
a browser if I wanted to goto da trouble).

djgpp's 'man' might provide inspiration in da future
for additional features in my modest viewer; but for now
I'm satisfied.  
For example invoking 'gzip' first, would be trivial, etc.

Find me an example of an _actual_ Linux Man-Page using some
of these more advanced or more wild Groff statements, and
I'll get back to you :-)  You can always email a copy to me,
and we'll see what happens.

I'm trying to keep my source BCB32 compatible, which means
that under Borland's 32-bit compiler, I actually have direct
access to the Windoze API, allowing for a few extra goodies
of my own to be thrown in.

Email: RadSurfer AT yahoo DOT com
ICQ: 67890170

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote in message news:<2914-Mon19Jan2004225515+0200-eliz AT elta DOT co DOT il>...
> > 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.