Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!ames!attctc!wnp
From: wnp@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Wolf Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Help with man macros
Summary: there is a .bd 1 3 statement in macros/an
Keywords: text processing nroff man macros
Message-ID: <8820@attctc.Dallas.TX.US>
Date: 30 Jul 89 20:14:19 GMT
References: <434@osc.COM>
Reply-To: wnp@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Wolf Paul)
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection BBS, Dallas, Tx
Lines: 44

In article <434@osc.COM> rp@osc.COM (Rich Patterson) writes:
 + Hi,
 + 	I have a question about the man macros.  The version of nroff and man
 + macros I have are those that come with System V rel 3.0 for the 386.
 + 	When I nroff a man page, like the ones that come with smail, gcc,
 + in other words ones that I didn't create,  I get interesting output for the
 + header:  (Command line: nroff -man pathalias.8 >pa.out; vi pa.out)
 + 
 + 	P^HP^HP^HP^HA^HA^HA^H ... so on for the header
 + 
 + 	What I assume is that the overstrike or backspacing is being used
 + for boldfacing.  I'm trying to get nroff not to output those overstrike
 + characters.  However, when I try the '-u' option for nroff, to set the
 + "emboldening factor",(the default is zero) it doesn't change the output.
 + I've also tried different -T output devices, and have compared the
 + Sys V man macros to Sun man macros (which don't output the overstrike
 + sequence) to no avail.  Can someone help ???  Any ideas or workarounds
 + would be great.  Please e-mail to me directly.  Thanks in advance.

I don't know why you don't find a difference between the SysV and SUN
man macros if the latter really don't do that backspace thing.

The reason the SysV macros do it is because there is a ".bd 1 3"
statement near the beginning of /usr/lib/macros/an, which is used to
print (a) the page header, and (b) the section headings. If you eliminate
that, and then insert appropriate font change commands in the right places,
using the appropriate -T option (one which has a start bold/end bold
sequence defined) will eliminate the overstrikes.

Alternatively you can run the nroff -man output through a sed script
like this:

	nroff -man foo.1 | sed 's/.^H//g' > foo.out

The reason -u does nothing is that the emboldening factor is not the
number of overstrikes, but the amount that the second strike will be
offset to the right -- it only works on microspacing devices anyway.

Wolf
-- 
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