[tldoc] Subject: Re: troff warning: numeric expression expected ? (got 't') â?? processing man page?

[Carlos]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 04:26:08PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Carlos,
> 
>     But when I ran it it kept spitting out on stdout the troff warning:
>     numeric expression expected (got 't') message
> 
> 1) You don't say what man page you're running groff on, or your exact
> invocation.
> 
> 2) As I recall, I also get that warning (and others) on some of the man
> pages. I ignore them.
> 
> 3) Isn't the output still reasonable?
> 
>     , a `proprietary` code while processing it
> 
> There is nothing "proprietary" in any man page in TL, as far as I know.
> 
>     Is this the case with any man page provided on TeX Live ? 
> 
> The man pages in TL are as written by the individual contributors. Thus
> they do not conform to any single pattern. The way they are written
> varies widely.
> 
>     If not, what would be the correct macros to run it alongside groff
>     successfully so I can have a pdf :)
> 
> As specified in Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/Makefile (not
> distributed, as I recall, only in svn), the invocation turns out to be
> this, for tex.1:
> groff -man -t -rS11 man1/tex.1 | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp && mv man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp man1/tex.man1.pdf || rm man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp
> 
> Which looks more complicated than it is, since half of it is worrying
> about the unlikely case when the groff|ps2pdf pipe fails. The short
> form, running in the directory with the man page, would be:
> groff -man -t -rS11 tex.1 | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - tex.man1.pdf
> 
> A few man pages require extra UTF-8 handling. You can look those up in
> man1/Makefile if you care. --hope this helps, karl.
> 
> 


I ended up installing the latest beta or testing version for groff which
finally compiled after making sure the dependencies were met 

And no man blank page was produced after all. 

The lead devs tried to give me a few hints but, I'm assuming is
problematic to troubleshoot this sort of issue on a different system
than mine. I guess it's understandable. 

thought of mentioning it to you. You've always being very helpful with
any issue that has come up. Thanks. 

I couldn't figure out in the end what was causing it, really


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