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Re: Rejected posting to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject:Re: Rejected posting to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU From:John Posada <posada -at- FAXSAV -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 28 Jan 1998 09:15:50 -0500
Let's try this again.
-----Original Message-----
From: L-Soft list server at OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY (1.8c) [SMTP:LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 1998 9:19 PM
To: John P Posada
Subject: Rejected posting to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
The distribution of your message dated Mon, 26 Jan 1998 17:21:47 -0500 with
subject "Re: man pages" has been rejected because you have exceeded the daily
per-user message limit for the TECHWR-L list. Other than the list owner, no one
is allowed to post more than 10 messages per day. Please resend your message at
a later time if you still want it to be posted to the list.
Carl Berqerson's access to the list is acting up, so he asked that I forward this response to my question about man pages.
------------------------------
John,
I still owe you the Word 1 styles. I have to go through the archives at
home to get them.
But let me try to explain how manual pages work on most Unix systems.
When the Unix system is first installed, most, if not all of the man
pages are stored in nroff/troff source files. When users request the
display of man pages they are run through the nroff formatter with the
an macro page supplied as a parameter. The output is redirected to both
the requester's display and to a file. Subsequent requests for the same
man page are provided from the newly formatted file rather than calling
the formatter each time. (Implementation dependent, the list of compiled
files may be pruned from time to time.) When the system sends the man
page to the requester's terminal it usually uses the terminfo facility
which does not have a parameter for italics (at least termcap, its
predecessor, didn't), so it uses some form of video highlighting. That's
probably what you thought were hyperlinks.
That said, regardless of where you originate the file, you must include
the nroff tags for the file to display properly. Formatting the file in
Word or Frame and then saving as text causes the loss of all formatting
and you still have to edit the text file to add the nroff tags. I find
that creating the file on the Unix box is far simpler, but I'm pretty
adept at vi. Most Unix implementations come vi and emacs and probably
other text editors as well. Your Unix system administrator can give you
help in this area. (If you have access to SCO Xenix or SCO Unix, they
used to have a couple of files that took you through basic vi operations
as you read the files in vi-very effective. Otherwise pick up the
O'Reilly book for the editor you want to use.)
Al Unix implementations I am aware of come with a spell checker and
another utility called deroff which strips nroff tags from a file. Run
the file through deroff, pipe the output through spell, and then
redirect that output to a file or the printer. If I remember, the
command line looks something like this:
deroff mydoc | spell > error.log
I hope this helps.
Carl Bergerson
Mission Viejo
Product Information
carl -dot- bergerson -at- unisys -dot- com
