Re: [groff] grohtml shortcomings

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi James,

James K. Lowden wrote on Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 11:29:37AM -0500:
> On Tue, 4 Dec 2018 05:40:58 +0100 Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> For PDF output, by all means, use groff, it is much, much better
>> than mandoc for that.  For mdoc to HTML, don't.

> Ingo, my colleague says the man macros EX and EE aren't supported on
> the version of FreeBSD he uses, which I assume is using some version of
> mandoc.

That depends on the version of FreeBSD, and whether he is using mandoc
from base or ports.

> Are they supported?

They have been supported for more than six years now.
Here is an extract from http://mandoc.bsd.lv/ChangeLog :

  2012-06-02 20:16  schwarze

        Changed:
                man.7 (1.116), "Exp", lines: +14 -2
                man.c (1.116), "Exp", lines: +2 -2
                man.h (1.61), "Exp", lines: +3 -1
                man_html.c (1.88), "Exp", lines: +4 -2
                man_macro.c (1.72), "Exp", lines: +3 -1
                man_term.c (1.129), "Exp", lines: +4 -2
                man_validate.c (1.81), "Exp", lines: +3 -1

        Minimal implementation of .EX and .EE for GNU compatibility.
        Do not use this, it is not portable and only defined in esr's
        man-ext.  For example, sox(1) wants these macros.

 $ printf "initial text\n.EX\nexample\ntext\n.EE\nfinal text\n" | \
   mandoc -Thtml
[...]
<div class="manual-text">initial text
<pre>
example
text
</pre>
final text</div>


> If so, I'll get the details.

Sure, a proper bug report (see http://mandoc.bsd.lv/contact.html )
is useful if there is anything unexpected.

Yours,
  Ingo