How are manual pages formatted?

[Leonard J. Peirce]

In article <1637 at atha.AthabascaU.CA> lyndon at cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>The UCB version of man recognizes some escapes in the ?roff source
>that tell man(1) to invoke various preprocessors. The Ultrix man
> [...]
>It sure would be nice if Ultrix picked up the MANPATH feature.)

Amen to that.

>The funny part of this is, although "man 7 man" doesn't document
>this feature under Ultrix, the Ultrix man(7) man page expects tbl
>to be invoked ahead of nroff when formatting it :-)
 
Actually, this is the first manual page that I found that wouldn't format
correctly with just nroff -man.  I found a few others that wouldn't format
correctly, too.  Thanks to Bill Lynch (lynch at umunhum.stanford.edu) for
telling me that

	tbl <file> | nroff -h -man - | col

is what he uses.  I tried it on the man pages that wouldn't format correctly
with just nroff -man and they came out fine.
--
Leonard J. Peirce               Internet:  peirce at gumby.cc.wmich.edu
Western Michigan University                peirce at gw.wmich.edu
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