Re: links in man2hlp

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> > I tried this to get punctuation marks out the link references
> > avoiding extra spaces (ala .BR or .IR). The best idea I got
> > was using "\&" as separator because it seems to have no side
> > effects for groff in the man page. I read something about
> > "\&" preventing kerning between characters but that doesn't
> > seem anything to worry about.
> 
> Another possible solution is .\" at the same line in .\"LINK2

Please show the examples.

> > I invented a LINK3 entry but if you trust the code it could go
> > as LINK2. I was careful with strings but I don't know if
> > glib functions must be used anyway.

Please, let's try to reduce complexity.  Two link formats is too much.  
If somebody applies your patch, then your code is trusted already.  Also 
please comment every fixme you add.

> > Is there anyway to get the date into the help/groff files?
> > I (me again :) wanted to complete the header and the footer
> > (in .TH at the head of the file). @VERSION@ seems to do the
> > job for the version (like @prefix@) in mc.1.in.

Why do you want to put the date automatically?  What's the point in having
any date in the manual if the date is updated automatically?  Updating it
by hand would be an extra requirement for the maintainers who edit the
manual.

Am I missing something?  Is the date required?

> There are yr (years since 1900), mo (month) and dy (day of 
> month)registers in groff. So, you can add something like
> .nr yr \n(yr+1900
> .TH ... "\n(dy-\n(mo-\n(yr"
> at the beginning of your man page.
> 
> Register support is not implemented in man2hlp now.

It shouldn't matter, since man2hlp happily skips the ".TH" macro.  It
would have to skip .nr as well, but I don't like this idea.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin