[tex-live] man pages for pdftools, dvips, etc. use unportable troff syntax

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Mon May 7 08:11:32 CEST 2007


Formatting the TeX Live 2007 man pages on Solaris 10 yields the
following diagnostics (using groff 1.19.2 in nroff compatibility mode;
there's a similar problem with Solaris 10 nroff):

/r/share1/man/./man1/pdftools.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/dvipos.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/texmfstart.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/pstopdf.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/texfont.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/fdf2tex.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/otftotfm.1:10: error: end of file while defining macro `BU'
/r/share1/man/./man1/texexec.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/lacheck.1:67: warning [p 2, 2.7i]: cannot adjust line
/r/share1/man/./man1/textools.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/ctxtools.1:1: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/texfind.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/makempy.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'
/r/share1/man/./man1/mptopdf.1:2: error: end of file while defining macro `UR'

The problem is the following macro definition:

  .de URL
  \\$2 \(laURL: \\$1 \(ra\\$3
  ..

Traditional troff had only 2-character macros, so this is parsed as:

  .de UR L
  \\$2 \(laURL: \\$1 \(ra\\$3
  ..

which means "this macro doesn't finish until you see a '.L' line."

The obvious fix is to shorten the macro name to "UR", or perhaps (to
avoid name clashes in -man) "Ur".


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