Anthony J. Bentley wrote in
<[email protected]>:
|Ken Hornstein writes:
|> Let's take the example you gave where the first line for a man
|> page that uses tbl should contain:
|>
|> '\" t
|>
|> So, my question is ... what does this mean? I understand that \" is
|> a comment, but I'm confused about the leading single quote.
...
|As for why the 't' is there, it's strictly a manpage practice, not
|a general roff authoring practice. man(1) peeks at the comment (man-db
|does anyway; pretty sure mandoc doesn't need it) to determine which
|preprocessors to run. E.g., a manual that needs the eqn preprocessor
|would have an 'e' instead.
|
|Normally the person piping a document through troff would be the author,
|and would already know that the document contains tables that require
|the source to be preprocessed with tbl. But manuals are formatted by
|users; the man(1) program doesn't know the document features in advance,
|and wants to avoid running preprocessors unless they're necessary.
For example, newer man(1)s read the first line of the manual and
check for a syntax <^'\" >followed by concat of [egprtv]+ (and in
fact *join in* $MANROFFSEQ environment [egprtv]+)
while getopts 'egprtv' preproc_arg; do
case "${preproc_arg}" in
e) pipeline="$pipeline | $EQN" ;;
g) GRAP ;; # Ignore for compatibility.
p) pipeline="$pipeline | $PIC" ;;
r) pipeline="$pipeline | $REFER" ;;
t) pipeline="$pipeline | $TBL" ;;
v) pipeline="$pipeline | $VGRIND" ;;
*) usage ;;
esac
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
