Mac OS X man does not display links

[sorin-ionescu]

Link rendering doesn't work in Mac OS X (BSD) man, v1.6c. For cross platform man pages, we need a way to specify that the links should be rendered as plain text.

[sunaku]

Are links not rendered at all (appear as blank spaces) or are they not
decorated properly (underlined and surrounded by angled brackets)?

A screenshot would help.

[sorin-ionescu]

Here you go. As you can see, the email address is missing. It's in the generated roff; it's just not being displayed.

We need a switch that tells md2man to adhere to different man/roff versions.

[sunaku]

Sorin, please try the fix in the issue-13 branch and tell me if it works for you.

[sunaku]

@sorin-ionescu I have tried several approaches to solving this bug, but none have yielded fruitful results:

• Using if-else conditionals to wrap the .MT and .ME e-mail address macros causes the trailing text that comes directly after the email address to be lost (it should be passed to .ME but it isn't).
• Defining .MT and .ME once (at the beginning of the output) as simple "print whatever is passed into this macro" did not work properly. I couldn't figure out how to make Roff do that. 😓

So in the end, I think our best bet is to have man(1) on Mac OSX somehow require the "an-ext.tmac" macro definition file, which is the thing that defines the .MT and ME e-mail address macros and also the .UR and .UE general URL link macros.

[sunaku]

@sorin-ionescu please try adding the following line at the top of your generated EXAMPLE.1 file and see if that causes your man(1) executable to render links:

.mso an-ext.tmac

If that doesn't work, please try:

.do mso an-ext.tmac

Thanks. 🙏

[sunaku]

I was able to try this out myself (on a Mac at a public library) but it didn't solve the problem because:

$ groff --version
...
GNU grops (groff) version 1.19.2
GNU troff (groff) version 1.19.2

The version of groff on Mac OS X is too old: it doesn't have the an-ext.tmac macro package that defines styles for email addresses and general URLs. 😰

[sorin-ionescu]

Yes, Mac OS X has always suffered from old BSD Core Utilities. Unfortunately, Macs are ubiquitous.

[sunaku]

I looked into my system's /usr/share/groff/1.22.2/tmac/an-ext.tmac file and found that the UR/UE/MT/ME macros are meant to facilitate roff to HTML conversion. Since our input format is Markdown, we can convert directly into HTML instead of going through roff, so I'm going to stop using these macros in md2man in the next major release (this would be a backwards-incompatible change).

[sunaku]

Fixed in 371952e. Will release soon.