[tex-live] display issue with "tlmgr help" ??

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Wed Sep 20 17:07:42 CEST 2017


On 11 September 2017 at 16:22, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
wrote:

I can confirm that perldoc perldoc behaves strangely om Mac but perldoc
> -oman perldoc works. I have perl in /opt/local/bin/perl but port info perl
> complains that perl does not exist. I do not remember how it was installed.
> When I tried perldoc -oman perldoc for the first time I got this message:
>
> $ perldoc -oman perldoc
>
> You have an old groff. Update to version 1.20.1 for good Unicode support.
>
> If you don't upgrade, wide characters may come out oddly.
>
>  at /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.24/Pod/Perldoc.pm line 1513.
>
> You have an old groff. Update to version 1.20.1 for good Unicode support.
>
> If you don't upgrade, wide characters may come out oddly.
>
>  at /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.24/Pod/Perldoc.pm line 1513.
>
>
> I do not know the source of my groff but it was not from MacPorts. After
> port install groff this message disapeared but behaviour is the same, -oman
> is still needed.
>
Apple provides (obsolete) /usr/bin/groff (version 1.19.2 on El Capitan)
with the Xcode command-line tools.    There are 3 modules that perldoc can
use to
format terminal output:

Pod::Perldoc::ToTerm (perldoc -oterm) , gives "1NAME1" output on macOS.
This is the default on linux, macports, and Msys2 (Windows)
Pod::Perldoc::ToMan (perldoc -oman -- requires groff, adds man-style
headers)  used by Apple's perldoc
Pod::Perldoc::ToText (perldoc -otext or perldoc -t), default for Windows

I have no idea where the default behaviour is configured.  Macports should
follow Xcode and make "-oman" the default.  Apple uses a number of
outdated GNU tools to avoid GPL3, so I don't expect Unicode support will
appear in Apple's groff.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20170920/e2e186e8/attachment.html>


More information about the tex-live mailing list