Re: dired-man can't deal with compressed pages

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
>> From: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>
>> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 21:03:02 +0200
>> 
>> I agree that this will not work for man who don't have the -l option.
>> On the other hand, man with the -l option should take the advantage of
>> this option.  So I think a good solution is to let users to choose
>> the command line they want, like in the patch below.
>
> The canonical Emacs solution to such situations is to try running
> `man' with the -l switch and see if it barfs.

Seeing how man barfs will not help to construct an alternative
command line.

>> I think it's better not to duplicate what man already does.
>
> `man' doesn't do what we want except where it supports -l.

This is why I suggested that the user should be able to specify
how to uncompress compressed man files (guznip, uncompress, etc.)

>> Blindly running the file through all preprocessors will fail if some
>> preprocessor is not installed.
>
> ??? Is that even possible?  I thought all the preprocessors we need
> (eqn, tbl, refer, and soelim) are always installed as part of the
> standard Troff/Groff/man packages.  How else would users be able to
> format the pages they have?

Could you assure that all these preprocessors are available for all
man versions?

>> > Yet another possible solution is to use functions from woman.el, which
>> > IIRC has a special command to format a single file.  However, I don't
>> > remember how well it supports various preprocessors.
>> 
>> There is already a dired binding to `W' key in woman.el.
>> So users desiring a woman can get her with this key.
>
> Then perhaps dired-x should suggest using it on systems which don't
> support "man -l", if the file at point requires that.

That would be good.

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