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From: ciemo@bananapc.wpd.sgi.com (Dave Ciemiewicz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: How to format man pages??
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.205943.12446@dragon.wpd.sgi.com>
Date: 11 Feb 91 20:59:43 GMT
References: <907@ki.UUCP> <1991Feb11.195501.11064@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Sender: news@dragon.wpd.sgi.com (CNews Account)
Reply-To: ciemo@bananapc.wpd.sgi.com (Dave Ciemiewicz)
Organization: sgi
Lines: 22

In article <907@ki.UUCP>, dwatts@ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes:
|> I've got a problem.  I purchased the Documentors Workbench software from
|> SGI so I could format man pages.  I put an unformatted man page into
|> /usr/catman/local/man1/ and entered "man name" and it just did a plain
|> cat of the unformatted file.  If I manually do an "nroff -man name" the

IRIX man uses a file typing heuristic for determining whether or not to format
a manual page versus trying to use the containing directory name for
determining the file type.  The heuristic is similar to the one used by the
command file(1) which reports the type of a file's contents.  Unfortunately,
there is a bug in the heuristic which does not consider n/troff style comments
for purposes of file typing, thus the heuristic "thinks" the file is just a 
cat'able file.  To verify this, trying doing "file foo.1" and see if file
"thinks" your man page is nroff text or ascii text.

An (albeit ugly) workaround is to strip nroff comments from the man pages
installed in /usr/catman/local.  (How can I duck to escape the flack from
this one?)

This bug has been fixed for the upcoming major release.  This new man also
features BSD lpr support and other enhancements requested by participants in
this news group.