xman & groff

[Terry Chan]

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 :]