TODOs

Date:: 2025-04-26

special chars

from roff(7):

A few characters commonly seen on keyboards are treated specially by the roff
language and may not look correct in output if  used  unthinkingly;  they are
the  (double)  quotation mark ("), the neutral apostrophe ('), the minus sign
(-), the backslash (\), the caret or circumflex accent (^), the grave accent
(`), and  the  tilde (~).  All of these and more can be produced with special
character escape sequences; see groff_char(7).

Issues

lines starting with a {not typeset} abc
#482 no default formatting ... use macros or leave to writer
How to typeset command/manpage names in text.

There are conflicting traditions and conventions on these points. groff_man_style(7) has recommendations.

Use bold for literal portions of syntax synopses, for command‐line options in running text, and for literals that are major topics of the subject under discussion; for example, this page uses bold for macro, string, and register names. In an .EX/.EE example of interactive I/O (such as a shell session), set only user input in bold.

Use italics for file and path names, for environment variables, for C data types, for enumeration or preprocessor constants in C, for variant (user‐ replaceable) portions of syntax synopses, for the first occurrence (only) of a technical concept being introduced, for names of journals and of literary works longer than an article, and anywhere a parameter requiring replacement by the user is encountered. An exception involves variant text in a context already typeset in italics, such as file or path names with replaceable components; in such cases, follow the convention of mathematical typography: set the file or path name in italics as usual but use roman for the variant part (see .IR and .RI below), and italics again in running roman text when referring to the variant material.

Plan 9 from User Space troff and groff 1.23.0 support an MR macro for the specific purpose of setting man page cross references. It is reasonable to assume that groff 1.23.0 has not propagated yet to every platform Python docutils would like to support yet. You can wait until it has, or supply a fallback definition in the man(7) documents you generate.
```
.\" Define fallback for groff 1.23's MR macro if the system lacks it.
.nr df 0 \" do fallback?
.if !\n(.f           .nr df 1 \" mandoc
.if  \n(.g .if !d MR .nr df 1 \" older groff
.if !\n(.g           .nr df 1 \" non-groff *roff
.if \n(df \{\
.de MR
.ie \\n(.$=1 \
.I \%\\$1
.el \
.IR \%\\$1 (\\$2)\\$3
..
.\}
.rr df
```
see groff_man_style
```
.SH "See also"
.
.MR \%tbl 1 ,
.MR \%eqn 1 ,
and
.MR \%refer 1
are preprocessors used with man pages.
.
.MR man 1
describes the man page librarian on your system.
```
but the rST source would be more like this
```
See also
========

tbl(1), eqn(1), and refer(1) are preprocessors used with man pages.
man(1) describes the man page ...
```
so the MR things need to be found with regexp or marked with a role/directive ? or a reference type man:tbl(1)

Note: The \% is :
a word may be broken at hyphens, at \% or \: escape sequences

whatfore at the word start ?

Branden Robinson writes:

You will not need to generate the arguments to the MR macro with a leading % escape sequence. ... see feature request #107

% Control hyphenation. The location of this escape

sequence within a word marks a hyphenation point, supplementing groff’s automatic hyphenation patterns. At the beginning of a word, it suppresses any hyphenation breaks within except those specified with %.* groff_man_style on
Hyperlink macros
Man page cross references like ls(1) are best presented with .MR. Text may be hyperlinked to email addresses with .MT/.ME or other URIs with .UR/.UE. Hyper‐ linked text is supported on HTML and terminal output devices; terminals and pager programs must support ECMA-48 OSC 8 escape sequences (see grotty(1)). When device support is unavailable or disabled with the U register (see section “Options” below), .MT and .UR URIs are rendered between angle brackets after the linked text.

.MT, .ME, .UR, and .UE are GNU extensions not defined on systems running AT&T, Plan 9, or Solaris troff; see an-ext.tmac in section “Files” below. Plan 9 from User Space's troff implements .MR.

The arguments to .MR, .MT, and .UR should be prepared for typesetting since they can appear in the output. Use special character escape sequences to encode Uni‐ code basic Latin characters where necessary, particularly the hyphen-minus. (See section “Portability” below.) URIs can be lengthy; rendering them can re‐ sult in jarring adjustment or variations in line length, or troff warnings when a hyperlink is longer than an output line. The application of non-printing break point escape sequences : after each slash (or series thereof), and before each dot (or series thereof) is recommended as a rule of thumb. The former practice avoids forcing a trailing slash in a URI onto a separate output line, and the latter helps the reader to avoid mistakenly interpreting a dot at the end of a line as a period (or multiple dots as an ellipsis). Thus,
```
.UR http://\:example\:.com/\:fb8afcfbaebc74e\:.cc
```
has several potential break points in the URI shown. Consider adding break points before or after at signs in email addresses, and question marks, amper‐ sands, and number signs in HTTP(S) URIs. The formatter removes : escape se‐ quences from hyperlinks when supplying device control commands to output dri‐ vers.

groff.1 at end of manpage has

.TP
\[lq]groff guess\[rq] utility:
.MR grog 1 \" #43
.
.
.\" Restore compatibility mode (for, e.g., Solaris 10/11).
.cp \n[*groff_groff_1_man_C]
.do rr *groff_groff_1_man_C
.

means what ? should we do this too ?

Used macros ... to be completed

.TP [indentation]

Set a paragraph with a leading tag, and the remainder of the paragraph indented. A one-line input trap is planted; text on the next line, which can be formatted with a macro, becomes the tag, which is placed at the current left margin. The tag can be extended with the c escape se‐ quence. Subsequent text is indented by indentation, if specified, and by the amount of the IN register otherwise. If the tag is not as wide as the indentation, the paragraph starts on the same line as the tag, at the applicable indentation, and continues on the following lines. Otherwise, the descriptive part of the paragraph begins on the line following the tag.

.TQ Set an additional tag for a paragraph tagged with .TP. An input trap is

planted as with .TP.

This macro is a GNU extension not defined on systems running AT&T, Plan 9, or Solaris troff; see an-ext.tmac in section “Files” below.

Notes

Images and equations are discouraged.
Lists in admonitions are not intended.
Branden Robinson on hyphens, minus <https://lwn.net/Articles/948563/> :

Unicode has a hyphen (U+2010) and a minus sign (U+2212), and "obviously", a person should input those code points for their distinct purposes.

This works great until someone needs needs to input a "literal" for an overloaded code point in the Basic Latin code chart that has syntactical significance to something like a shell prompt or a language compiler. Then they need that hen's tooth U+002D code point, even though it is meaningful _only_ for talking to computers, and not for any other domain of discourse. And that's not even taking into account the folks who ride in an want distinguishable en dashes, em dashes, figure dashes, and others the LWN article didn't mention. Fitting distinguishable glyphs for these into a half-width character cell even with a fair number of pixels in the horizontal dimension (say, more than 8) starts to become a real pickle.

and in groff_man_style
```
\-   Minus sign or basic Latin hyphen-minus. This escape sequence produces
     the Unix command-line option dash in the output.
     “-” is a hyphen in the roff language; some output devices replace it
     with U+2010 (hyphen) or similar.
```

Discussions

Encoding declaration '\" t -*- coding: ISO-8859-1 -*- in first line.

The part after t is a GNU Emacs convention. A groff program called preconv(1) understands it, but GNU troff(1) itself does not.

The t is part of a man(1) convention; GNU troff(1) doesn't understand it, either (but since tbl(1) is a roff preprocessor, it's too late by the time troff sees the input anyway).
BUT if UTF-8 is declared tables are no longer processed.
BUT we have a comment there and the macros following it
Input and output encoding are problematic at least.
input/optionstoo.txt:23: (ERROR/3) Unexpected indentation. is what it is ... leave it so.
doublespace after end of sentence in manpages ?

see https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/bugs/427/

Chicago manual of style ... hard to automate.
Check docs/user/manpage.txt
escape double quotes in macro arguments ?

Use the special character escape sequence \(dq. groff_man_style(7) explains.

(dq Basic Latin quotation mark (double quote). Use in macro

calls to prevent ‘"” from being interpreted as beginning a quoted argument, or simply for readability.

.TP .BI "split (dq" text (dq

How to write long syntax lines.

groff_man_style(7) explains.:

\newline
       Join the next input line to the current one.  Except for
       the update of the input line counter (used for diagnostic
       messages and related purposes), a series of lines ending
       in backslash‐newline appears to groff as a single input
       line.  Use this escape sequence to split excessively long
       input lines for document maintenance.

Line ends around email or web addresses in texts.

The UE and ME macros accept an argument, which is appended to the link text without intervening space.

groff_man_style(7) explains.

c End a text line without inserting space or attempting a

break. Normally, if filling is enabled, the end of a text line is treated like a space; an output line may be broken there (if not, an adjustable space is inserted); if filling is disabled, the line will be broken there, as in .EX/.EE examples. The next line is interpreted as usual and can include a macro call (contrast with newline). c is useful when three font styles are needed in a single word, as in a command synopsis.

.RB [ --stylesheet=c .IR name ]

It also helps when changing font styles in .EX/.EE examples, since they are not filled.

.EX $ c .B groff -T utf8 -Z c .I file c .B | grotty -i .EE

Here's an example using groff's MT and ME macros.:
```
Mail the maintainer (\c
.MT maint@example.com
Arthur Pewtey
.ME )
to submit patches.
```
How to distinguish something is inline or not in the writer so to maybe put long urls after the current paragraph ?