Re: groff man-page incompatibility

[Werner LEMBERG]

> This is the heading I get from "man groff" when
> running groff 1.20.1 under cygwin. (Overstrikes and
> color effects have been elided for readability.)
> 
> NAME
>        groff - front-end for the groff document formatting system
> 
> SYNOPSIS
>        [file ...]  -h | --help -v | --version [option ...]

Uh, oh, how comes?

> It appears that the trouble is that the various groff man pages use
> .SY and .OP to build the synopsis,

Yes.

> but the macro package doc.tmac doesn't define them.

This is correct.

> .SY and .OP are defined in an-ext.tmac, which is not called from any
> other .tmac file.

Actually, it is: `an-old.tmac' loads it.  If you say

  groff -man ...

the file `an.tmac' immediately loads `andoc.tmac', and this file
decides whether to use the `an-old.tmac' or the `doc.tmac' macro
package, depending on whether the man page starts with `.TH' or `.Dd',
respectively.

> Other groff* man pages suffer similarly. Non-groff man pages
> use .Sh and .Op.

This shouldn't be a problem whatsoever.

> The symptom was seen using man-1.6e or man-1.6f; I don't know about
> earlier versions.

Something must be broken on your system.  I suspect that you aren't
using the macros from groff 1.20.1 but something older (1.19.2 or
before), and you try to view recent groff man pages which need the man
extensions.

Note that you are the first who reports this problem.


    Werner