Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Ken Hornstein]

>The status quo is fine.  It doesn't require understanding all of troff.
>Just man(7) plus the odd bit here and there.

Sigh.  The "odd bit" unfortunately, for me, requires a lot of knowledge
that seems to take some serious roff-fu.

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 a random
note, this string is rather hard to search for.  Also, I don't really
understand how single quotes are used in roff, I guess; all of the
documentation seems to assume you already know this.  And it's this
way for me for EVERY SINGLE BIT of "odd bit"; there's a huge pile of
knowledge that is assumed you know.  It's not that I'm afraid of digging
into hours-long rat holes; I write programs using OpenSSL, after all.
It's just a lot to deal with when I am just trying to format a nice
table.  And I do it so infrequently that I have to re-learn it all
every time I want to edit a man page.

(I did play around with tbl, and it seems like that is actually very
easy so I am thinking that Anthony is is right and we should just switch
to that).

--Ken