Re: [Groff] Choosing a portability target

[Eric S. Raymond]

Clarke Echols <address@hidden>:
> In the case of the 1800 or so man pages I was responsible for at HP,
> I *never* encountered a need for anything like pic.

I hear you.  I happen to like pic, but for man pages it is a frill 
rather than a necessity.

> It would be nice to be able to have an index facility online that
> goes beyond man -k which uses only the NAME line.

There is a way we could support this, or at least forward-design so
the index data will be in place if authors choose to add them.

Some extended versions of man already feature an .IX macro for
declaring an index key to the location where the macro occurs;
doclifter translates this to a DocBook index-entry tag.

It might not be a bad idea to bless this practice in the groff_man(7) 
documentation.  Unlike some other extensions, it can't cause a
compatibility problem, because .IX can be safely ignored.  
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>