In the message dated: Thu, 03 May 2012 11:21:26 EDT,
The pithy ruminations from "John BORIS" on
<[lopsa-discuss] Looking for help with troff documents> were:
=> Here at $WORK I maintain a legacy system that does its reports with
=> essentially troff. We use an enhanced version called Eroff but the
=> commands are the same except for the ones that Eroff adds but the normal
=> ifs, else and brackets are the same. This is not a macro issue it is an
=> issue with sections and logic.
=>
Ah, fond memories.
=> The documents were created years ago and each year they have just been
=> edited. My issues normally are with someone deleting a .\} or a \{\ or
As suggested, a revision control system would be a huge help. You don't need
anything as fancy as a distributed client/server system--I'm a big fan of
using RCS (possibly in addition to svn) for local revision control.
=> add an errant one of these. Things work fine until the perfect storm and
=> bingo pages print on top of each other.
=>
=> My way of fixing these is to print out the source of the document and
=> tape the pages together. (Sadly all of our dot matrix printers have gone
Ouch.
=> I was wondering if there is anyone on the list that had dealt with
=> troff documents and came across a profiler or some other script or code
=> highlighter that you could run the document through that would tell you
=> certain things are missing or out of whack. I had a C profiler at one
Yes:
checknr
Somewhere in the deep recesses of my tar files from my first job (writing Unix
documentation, in 1988) I think I may have a crude equivalent to "lint" for
*roff, written in awk. I'll take a look.
Is the expected output in a specific enough form that it could be
machine-parsed?
The sanity check could be something as simple as knowing that the output
should be somewhere between 4~8 pages. If you create the document with
"nroff" and grep for the page header or footer, and find that a document
has 1 page of 640 lines, or 350 pages at 2 lines each, for example,
then you've got an automated test that has detected a problem with the
source code (eroff) before producing a hard copy.
Mark
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