xman & groff

Terry Chan tchan at dbguin.lunar-linux.org
Mon Aug 25 04:10:01 GMT 2003


Erik,

Actually the change was in groff 1.17.2 and higher.  And from the groff
Mailing list the default behavior of groff is to include the new escape
sequences.

There is a quick hack/fix for groff that will will restore the old escape
sequence and this will fix xman for you.

"export GROFF_NO_SGR=1"

at a bash prompt and then invoke your "xman &".  The escape sequence
problem should then go away.  If this works for you then you can add
the above export to your .bashrc or maybe your /etc/bashrc .

Terry Chan
-----------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 03:18:08AM +0000, Terry Chan wrote:
> Erik,
> 
> Technically those symlinks are bad programming assumptions from the
> xman developers.  But since it was easier to just add the symlinks
> as you suggessted to groff, than fix xman (which is a part of xfree86)
> I have updated moonbase with your suggestion.
> 
> As to xman displaying raw ANSI sequences, that occurs because groff
> (1.19 vs 1.18.1) changed the default way it outputs those sequences.  The man
> pager and Emacs have been updated to correctly handle the new sequences, but
> no one know how to configure xman to handle the new escape sequences.
> 
> Bottom line, use command line "man", or "info" or "emacs" to read your man
> pages and the escape sequences will be handled correctly.
> 
> If you find the solution we'll be glad to apply it.
> 
> Terry Chan
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 01:53:56AM +0200, Erik Søe Sørensen wrote:
> > Hi again...
> > xman tries to execute geqn, gtbl and zsoelim when showing man pages.
> > As far as I can tell, these commands are normally symlinks:
> > (in /usr/bin: )
> >   ln -s eqn geqn
> >   ln -s tbl gtbl
> >   ln -s soelim zsoelim
> > 
> > Creating these links stops xman from complaining. If this is the right 
> > thing to do, this symlink-creation should be added to the groff module.
> > 
> > But xman still displays man pages funnily:
> >   1mNAME0m
> >        bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
> > 
> >   1mSYNOPSIS0m
> >        1mbash 22m[options] [file]
> > (Escape codes are not generated or interpreted correctly).
> > Does any of you know how to fix this?
> > 
> > /Erik [who has found an outlet for his Lunar issues :]


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