Bugzilla Bug 21018

for some reason the .ll value in a manpage does not get evaluated by groff, and
so it always defaults to the default column width of 80. I would be extremely
sure that this is a bug in groff, but it doesn't seem to have been mentioned by
anyone else, so i'm half thinking it's actually a "feature"....



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.install any groff 1.18 or 1.18.1 ebuild
2.look at a manpage
3.ewwwww always 80 columns...

Actual Results:  

http://thirtythreeandathird.net/badman.png

Expected Results:  

http://thirtythreeandathird.net/goodman.png


I've been looking at this on the forums, and someone provided a good hack to
make it display correctly, by adding "-rLL=$[`tput cols`*9/10]n" to the default
NROFF value in man.conf. presumably "-rLL=$[COLUMNS*9/10]n" would be suitable
aswell.

the fact that LL works fine there makes me think that even more it is a bug.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=320728#320728

This does appear to be within groff itself, and not really the ebuild, but it
can be easily fixed within the ebuild...

grant.mcdorman has written a patch for the man ebuild here...

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=323174#323174

I wouldn't know if this should be put down to man being "different" or groff being "wrong" but this works.

thanks

chris phillips

Mr. Philip's initial description isn't quite right. The initial .ll directive
is not ignored; rather, 
it is indeed acted upon - but then the mandoc macros override it later. 

This is done by the mandoc macros checking register LL. If this is not set (or
rather, is not 
numeric), a default width (78n) is used; otherwise, the value in the register
is used. 

The patch I wrote metioned by Mr. Philip changes man, rather than groff, to
output 
  .nr LL <width> 
as well as the .ll directive. This allows the line width change to work with
previous 
versions of groff as well as the current, without changing the groff behaviour. 

tavis, would you look at this?

looks good to me, if theres no objections i'll commit it to unstable later
tonight (BST).

comitted, man-1.5l-r6 contains the patch. 

its marked unstable, Thanks!

that's great, thanks a lot guys. Gentoo kicks ass! (sorry i came over all
american ....)