Source: help2man Version: 1.49.3 Severity: wishlist In trixie and above, including tables in a manpage does not work anymore, unless the "tbl" preprocessor is added explicitly. This means tables are not rendered, and warnings of the following form are emitted:
warning: tbl preprocessor failed, or it or soelim was not run; table(s) likely not rendered (TE macro called with TW register undefined) help2man does not output any tables by default (AIUI) but in case one adds text e.g. in their DESCRIPTION that includes tables, it won't work. Per [1][2] the fix is for the first line of the manpage to be: '\" t I did not find a way to inject this with help2man, and checking through the source, it just seems there is no support for that. (I can of course easily post-process the file, but this is not ideal.) 1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/08/msg00220.html 2: https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/man-db/man.1.en.html#DEFAULTS To reproduce, you can generate a table with: $ cat <<EOF | lowdown -tman | Column1 | Column2 | | ------- | ------- | | foo | bar | EOF And then include this to e.g. under a [DESCRIPTION] header. Then pass the generated manpage through: LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 MANROFFSEQ='' MANWIDTH=80 man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l -Tutf8 -Z >/dev/null (which is what lintian does) and observe if there are any warnings. While my issue is specific to the "tbl" preprocessor, man(1) supports other preprocessors, including eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer (r). See the `-p` argument. Perhaps help2man should just gain an argument to support adding arbitrary preprocessors to its output? Thanks, Faidon
