deroff help
Pat Nelson
nelson at iris.ucdavis.edu
Thu Jan 18 09:40:26 AEST 1990
I have received a request for help from one of the faculty here at
UC Davis. We have talked to Berkeley and AT+T for help and they suggested we
send a request to the net for help. Any suggestions?
Copy of the request below.
Please respond directly via email to internet address
nelson at iris.ucdavis.edu
|_______________________________________________________________________
|
|I'm having problems with deroff (used as part of spell). It dumps
|core on our DEC 8600 running Ultrix-32 V3.1 (Rev. 9) System #3:
|
|The problem is that deroff interprets the .PS/.PE (which I had defined
|as my own -me macros) as pic output and tries to gobble the pic
|output. I didn't trace exactly how it dumps core. (I suspect that the
|\e\| is part of the problem.) Note that gobbling pic input is not
|documented in any man page I have seen.
|
|I've attached a sample, which is fairly short; the
|problem is very sensitive (e.g., if I remove a plain text line,
|deroff works fine).
|
|The fix is to use yet another undocumented feature: e.g., deroff -me
|works fine. Except of course, that needs to be specified in the spell
|script.
|
|Are there any patches to the code and man pages that we
|should know about so we dont have to use an undocumented fix?
|
|Thanks.
------------------------------cut here----------------------------
|In addition, character literals
|.PS
| "here is a \e\|" in the middle"
|.PE
|The string type has one, binary operator defined on it.
|String concatenation,
|represented by |\&|,
|combines its two operand strings into a new string.
|The pre-defined function maxlength(s)
|returns the maximum number of characters in string s.
|For either function,
|s can be a variable or an arbitrary string expression.
|The following table gives some examples of these pre-defined
|functions assuming x is a string variable declared string[20]
|and its current value is "oscar".
|.(b
|.TS
|l l l.
|expr length(expr) maxlength(expr)
|_ _ _
|"abc" || x 8 8
|.TE
|.)b
|Note that
|the values of length and maxlength are the same
|for an expression that contains more than just a single variable.
___________________________________________________________________
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