>The status quo is fine. It doesn't require understanding all of troff. >Just man(7) plus the odd bit here and there.
Sigh. The "odd bit" unfortunately, for me, requires a lot of knowledge that seems to take some serious roff-fu. Let's take the example you gave where the first line for a man page that uses tbl should contain: '\" t So, my question is ... what does this mean? I understand that \" is a comment, but I'm confused about the leading single quote. As a random note, this string is rather hard to search for. Also, I don't really understand how single quotes are used in roff, I guess; all of the documentation seems to assume you already know this. And it's this way for me for EVERY SINGLE BIT of "odd bit"; there's a huge pile of knowledge that is assumed you know. It's not that I'm afraid of digging into hours-long rat holes; I write programs using OpenSSL, after all. It's just a lot to deal with when I am just trying to format a nice table. And I do it so infrequently that I have to re-learn it all every time I want to edit a man page. (I did play around with tbl, and it seems like that is actually very easy so I am thinking that Anthony is is right and we should just switch to that). --Ken