Wanted: di-nroff /usr/lib/nterm documentation, i.e. nterm(5)

[Luc Rooijakkers]

I am modifying an nroff(1) clone to be more device-independent. In doing
so, I want it to read the new ascii terminal description files which are
normally stored in /usr/lib/nterm/tab.* on systems that have them. Does
anyone have *authorative* information about those? I do know their
general format, but not the details. More specifically,

	* Is the terminal name required to be on the first line, or can
	  it be preceded by blank lines?
	* Do the keywords have to be in a particular order?
	* Are there required keywords, or can they be omitted?
	* What does nroff do when it is given empty bdon/bdoff or empty
	  iton/itoff strings? Does it revert to the char-backspace-char
	  method of producing bold and italic ?
	* What kind of escape codes are accepted in strings? I know that
	  \b \n \r \t \ddd are accepted, but what about \e \xdd etc ?
	* Are embedded nulls allowed in strings ?
	* How many character definitions are allowed, and are there any
	  required ones? How does nroff react when you use \(xx but
	  character `xx' is not defined in the terminal table?
	* Do character names have to be two characters long?

Most of these should be answered by nterm(5), so if anyone has it,
please answer! (Of course, you could just send it to me...). One more
question:

	* What characters are underlined by nroff with .ul ? The new
	  ascii terminal tables do not specify wether or not a character
	  should be underlined, as the old binary ones did.

Are there any other differences of di-nroff with plain old nroff? One
thing that comes to mind is a settable basic unit size...

Please E-mail, as I don't think this is of general interest. Followups
have been redirected to `poster'.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Luc Rooijakkers                                 Internet: lwj at cs.kun.nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science     UUCP: uunet!cs.kun.nl!lwj
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands         tel. +3180652271