Re: groff injects blank page

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Carlos,

At 2023-04-22T16:46:00-0400, Carlos wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:00:34PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > At 2023-04-22T12:36:51-0400, Carlos wrote:
> > > How am I supposed to give you an example? 
> > 
> > For a guy who likes manually constructing pipelines, Ralph seems
> > inordinately disinterested in the intermediate stages when
> > troubleshooting.  ;-)
> > 
> > Unfortunately the PostScript output you've been sharing is not terribly
> > helpful; please hold off for now.  Your "nroff -man | cat -n" output is
> > the most telling clue we have so far, in my opinion.
> 
> Sure. But no one's sure of the cause of the blank page.
> 
> If you had to guess, what would it be? 

At present my guess is a loose blank line in your /etc/groff/man.local.

> > It might be worth comparing the /etc/groff/man.local files in both
> > your main distribution (which you haven't identified) and Alpine
> > Linux.
> 
> I'll check.
> 
> If on the other hand, I were to compare the stats from groff and
> the other spare machine where no blank page is injected, then it'd
> alnost be like cheating the way out to find the cause, which is not
> fair either for a blank page. Just joking. But I'll check. 
> 
> It's interesting nonetheless.

[...]
> > The groff_man(7) man page will tell you exactly where the man.local
> > file is installed.  View the man page and scroll down to the "Files"
> > section.
> 
> Did you mean groff man(7) or roff or man(7) man. Sorry but I couldn't
> find the section or subsection titled Files

I mean groff_man(7) with the underscore.

$ MANWIDTH=72 man groff_man | sed -n '/^FILES/,/^NOTES/p'
FILES
       /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/man.tmac
       /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an.tmac
              These are wrapper files to call andoc.tmac.

       /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/andoc.tmac
              This brief groff program detects whether the man or mdoc
              macro package is being used by a document and loads  the
              correct  macro definitions, taking advantage of the fact
              that pages using them must  call  .TH  or  .Dd,  respec‐
              tively,  as  their  first  macro.   Because the wrappers
              above load this file, a man program or user typing,  for
              example,  “groff -man page.1”, need not know which pack‐
              age the file page.1 uses.  Multiple man pages, in either
              format, can be handled.

       /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an-old.tmac
              Most  man  macros  are  contained in this file.  It also
              loads the GNU extensions from an-ext.tmac (see below).

       /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an-ext.tmac
              The extension macro definitions for .SY, .OP, .YS,  .TQ,
              .EX/.EE,  .UR/.UE,  and  .MT/.ME  are  contained in this
              file, which is written in classic troff and permissively
              licensed—not  copylefted.   Man  page  authors concerned
              about portability to legacy Unix systems are  encouraged
              to  copy  these  definitions into their pages, and main‐
              tainers of troff implementations or  work‐alike  systems
              that format man pages are encouraged to re‐use them.

              Note  that the definitions for these macros are read af‐
              ter the call of .TH, so they will replace any macros  of
              the  same  names  preceding it in your file.  If you use
              your own implementations of these macros, they  must  be
              defined after calling .TH to have any effect.

       /usr/share/groff/site-tmac/man.local
              Local changes and customizations should be put into this
              file.

NOTES

(On my Debian system, /usr/share/groff/site-tmac is a symbolic link to
/etc/groff.  Nothing wrong with that.)

Regards,
Branden

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