Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Bakul Shah wrote in
 <D2DCB9E8-EF47-40E4-BA82-96A17BB2CB9F@iitbombay.org>:
 |On Apr 3, 2023, at 2:40 PM, Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> wrote:
 |> 
 |> tbl (which seems like it has been supported ... forever?) does the hard
 |> work of creating tables for you.  It seems like the right tool for the
 |> job; even I could figure it out.  As Anthony has pointed out mandoc
 |> is the default man page formatter for BSD systems, now MacOS X, and
 |> some Linux distributions.  Seems to me that switching to tbl for those
 |> things is a no-brainer unless I am missing something, which is always
 |> possible!
 |
 |I don't see a tbl command on MacOS (or freebsd, except if you
 |installed groff (or plan9port -- ignore the troff comment!).

mandoc has primitivized versions built-in.

 |Unless you mean replacing the current setup with the output of
 |equivalent tbl syntax and then checking that in? I tried that.
 |mandoc doesn't understand tbl output for the simple test i tried.
 |
 |/usr/local/bin/tbl <<EOF| mandoc -man
 |.TS
 |c c c .
 |This is   centered
 |Well,     this also
 |.TE
 |EOF
 |
 |But groff's (& plan9port's) nroff deals with this fine.

Well Apple could have paid some money for people to improve groff,
so they have chosen some very fast and good program that displays
"as it would show up" instead of a real tradition and programmable
thing.  I understand this a bit, as they want their system to be
slim and fast.  Heh.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)