[bug-notifications] [groff 0004280]: /opt/csw/share/groff/1.20.1/tmac/doc.tmac:3375: bad character definition

[Mantis Bug Tracker]

A NOTE has been added to this issue. 
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http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=4280 
====================================================================== 
Reported By:                skayser
Assigned To:                james
====================================================================== 
Project:                    groff
Issue ID:                   4280
Category:                   regular use
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     assigned
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Date Submitted:             2010-02-16 19:22 CET
Last Modified:              2010-02-24 00:21 CET
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Summary:                    /opt/csw/share/groff/1.20.1/tmac/doc.tmac:3375: bad
character definition
Description: 
Tested on build10x. When trying to format the autossh man page with gnroff,
gnroff throws a warning:

$ gnroff -man autossh.1 > /dev/null
/opt/csw/share/groff/1.20.1/tmac/doc.tmac:3375: bad character definition

The first part of the formatted man page (everything before the first .Sh)
looks a bit garbled, although I don't know whether that's because of the
above warning.

R] .if 0nl]   .    setup-header
...
UNTITLED                             LOCAL                           
UNTITLED
...
$] .tm Usage: .Sh section_name ...
(http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=0.c])

I have attached the man page so that you can reproduce the warning message
if necessary (and maybe shed some light on the garbled output). WRT to the
warning message there is also a related bug report over at Gentoo:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/263524.
====================================================================== 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 (0007514) skayser (administrator) - 2010-02-24 00:21
 http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=4280#c7514 
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Thanks very much for all the explanation James! Further to this I found the
roff(7) man page a very enlightening read, in particular on how the
differents sub parts fit together (groff, gtroff/gnroff, grotty and such).
WRT to the autossh package, it now ships with a pre-formatted catman man
page which is produced via

  groff -m doc -Tascii -P-cuob $(WORKSRC)/autossh.1

For future reference, if anyone stumbles upon a man page which won't
properly format with the man macro package, the grog(1) utility tries to
heuristicly determine the macro package that is used by a particular man
page (and by this the groff invocation line which is suitable to produce
intermediary roff output).

Example:

$ grog ./work/build-isa-sparcv8/autossh-1.4b/autossh.1
groff -mdoc ./work/build-isa-sparcv8/autossh-1.4b/autossh.1

Then either of:
$ groff -Tascii -mdoc ./work/build-isa-sparcv8/autossh-1.4b/autossh.1
$ gnroff -mdoc ./work/build-isa-sparcv8/autossh-1.4b/autossh.1
... (nicely formatted man page) ...