Re: Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1)))

G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-09T18:55:28Z

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[dropping some people I recognize from the groff list from CC]

At 2023-04-09T14:17:57+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> - Using plain man(7) source is blazingly fast. So much that I
> don't miss mdoc(7)'s indexability so much.
>
> However, I must admit that I do miss mdoc(7)'s power sometimes.
> The man_lsfunc() and man_lsvar() functions for finding function
> prototypes and variable declarations in man(7) source would be
> much simpler using mdoc(1), and I could even use mandoc(1) to
> find such things.

I must point out that I have sketched a solution for solving the problem
of semantic tagging in man(7).

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-12/msg00075.html

...though perhaps I should add some detail to that sketch. My ideas are
firming up, so I may mail a proposal to groff@ and linux-man@ in the
near future.

I'm happy to report that all the man(7) extension macros I have in mind,
except for `Q` for quotation[1], will be trivially ignorable; i.e., an
implementation (like mandoc(1)) that doesn't recognize them can ignore
them (treating them as comment lines) without doing damage to the
rendered text of a page.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-12/msg00078.html

...and even that admits a one-line fallback definition. I suspect
you could even get away with defining it as a string.

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