Re: groff injects blank page

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-04-22T12:36:51-0400, Carlos wrote:
> How am I supposed to give you an example? 

For a guy who likes manually constructing pipelines, Ralph seems
inordinately disinterested in the intermediate stages when
troubleshooting.  ;-)

Unfortunately the PostScript output you've been sharing is not terribly
helpful; please hold off for now.  Your "nroff -man | cat -n" output is
the most telling clue we have so far, in my opinion.

> gdb nroff?

Not likely--that's a shell script!

> I can confirm that -mandoc or -man for that matter on Alpine Linux
> along with groff 1.22 shoves the blank page right in the beginning

It might be worth comparing the /etc/groff/man.local files in both your
main distribution (which you haven't identified) and Alpine Linux.

> If in doubt, set up a project, take your time, no one's rushing you,
> and install Alpine stable and see for yourself :)

I hear their diff command is a little anemic...

> The only version that works without an extra blank page, not extra
> really, since it shoves it up in the beginning, is
> 
> GNU groff version 1.23.0.rc4.19-96b92 so far

The groff_man(7) man page will tell you exactly where the man.local file
is installed.  View the man page and scroll down to the "Files" section.

> which its compilation finally went through after installing netpbm
> 
> But I'm not very keen on the latter,

I've never met anyone who had a grievance with netpbm before.  But it
shouldn't matter; if you don't care to use groff's HTML output support,
you don't need netpbm, and the build should not fail without it--but it
_will_ warn you (upon configuration) that HTML support will be absent.

[partial build log snipped]

I saw nothing remarkable or erroneous in that build log.

Regards,
Branden

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