Re: Implementing roff requests.

[Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>]

Hi Jesse,

Welcome!

As Ingo has mentioned, a few of these macros aren't possible given the 
layering of mandoc: roff.c is an opaque preprocessor and has limited 
functionality to cue the next processors (libmandoc.h), and no control 
at all over the front-ends (main.h).  `.ad', for example, is not 
possible given the current layering.  You'd need a separate <div> tag in 
HTML mode and it's uncertain how this would play with other 
implicit-margin-changing constructs (like lists).

As you can see, roff.c itself is quite delicate---too delicate, if you 
ask me, bowing under conditionals and loops and so on.  roff and mandoc 
don't mix well: mandoc is [more or less] reflowable, while roff is line- 
and character-based.  If your focus is moving more and more into roff, 
you may want to revive Heirloom troff instead of using mandoc.  I 
actually prefer to move /away/ from roff unless explicitly demanded. 
Things like .ns, for example, already have -mdoc equivalents.

You might get partial coverage by re-writing `ns' as an appropriate 
-mdoc or -man no-space macro, but I'm not certain about behaviour. 
Furthermore, this would pollute the layering even more with knowledge of 
the underlying parse type.  As written above, there's a well-defined 
point of diminishing returns here.

I also note that tabs are a headache: I designed mandoc poorly in this 
regard.  I think an awesome coup would be to throw out all the 
tab-handling in -mdoc, consider tabbed `Bl -column' lists to be synonyms 
for `Bd', and use the standard argument-parser.  This has been in my 
TODO OF DEATH since forever.  It would throw out a lot of ugly, 
workaround code, and also accomodate for lots of tab-separated `Bl 
-column' syntax found in the wild.

Meanwhile, if you've any implementations of macros, please send them to 
tech and we'll look them over!

Best,

Kristaps
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