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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>
> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 02:45:13 +0200
> 
> > From: Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org>
> > To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> > Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 06:45:22 +0800
> >
> > dired-man can't deal with resolvconf.8.gz etc. compressed man pages.
> 
> I think this problem can be fixed by invoking man with the -l option
> and letting it to handle man files properly instead of calling the
> current "nroff -man -h", i.e. to decompress the manual page files,
> to format the nroff source more correctly: preprocess it thought tbl,
> use correct switches, etc. all what man program does.

I'm not sure this is the right way of solving the problem.  For
starters, the "-l" switch is not portable: most versions of `man'
don't support it.  And after thinking for a while, I don't see any way
of forcing those versions of `man' who don't have "-l" to format a
specific file.  I presume this is the reason why dired-x runs nroff
directly.

If the only problem with the current code is that it doesn't support
compressed man pages, perhaps we could detect compressed files and
decompress them on the fly.

As for preprocessors, I don't know.  If this is important, we could
blindly run the file through all of them, for example, or have a user
option to do that.

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.