Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 03 Apr 2023 17:58:44 +0100
    From:        Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>
    Message-ID:  <20230403165844.E9A5F2136E@orac.inputplus.co.uk>

  | - Require groff.  A win all round.

If you mean "require a *roff compat text processor" then OK, but if
you really mean "groff" then no, never.   MH (and nmh) is a nice free,
available to everyone, mail system.   Removing that by requiring anything
encumbered by any kind of commercial licence (including the GPL) would be
a huge step into the darkness.

Certainly converting to mdoc is not a trivial task, though once done it
tends to produce better results than man for many situations (better HTML
versions for example - man likes to paginate, always).   I used to be
(kind of) in your camp, and resist mandoc because it couldn't do all the
small fiddles that are possible using *roff, but I have changed my mind.
There are still some things I wish mdoc could do, which it cannot (and
there seems to be no interest in upgrading it - the argument being that
it would take forever to get a version with a new feature installed
everywhere, so no man pages can actually use the new thing, so there's
no point adding it if no-one can use it).   But overall, if a new man
page is being written, or an old one is being completely overhauled,
using mdoc (processing with either mandoc or *roff -mdoc) tends to get
what you want done, and looking good in all of text (for grep or similar)
terminal (for viewing using "man") pdf (for printing, or whatever else)
and html (you know what for - and it is not e-mail).

Actually taking a large set of man pages written for -man and converting
them to -mdoc just so they are mdoc rather than man however is almost
certainly a waste of time, unless someone with mdoc knowledge has a large
amount of available time, and nothing productive do with it, and also
doesn't mind a large amount of (often) fairly mindless grunt work.

kre