[tldoc] troff warning: numeric expression expected (got 't') — processing man page

[Karl Berry]

Hi Carlos,

    But when I ran it it kept spitting out on stdout the troff warning:
    numeric expression expected (got 't') message

1) You don't say what man page you're running groff on, or your exact
invocation.

2) As I recall, I also get that warning (and others) on some of the man
pages. I ignore them.

3) Isn't the output still reasonable?

    , a `proprietary` code while processing it

There is nothing "proprietary" in any man page in TL, as far as I know.

    Is this the case with any man page provided on TeX Live ? 

The man pages in TL are as written by the individual contributors. Thus
they do not conform to any single pattern. The way they are written
varies widely.

    If not, what would be the correct macros to run it alongside groff
    successfully so I can have a pdf :)

As specified in Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/Makefile (not
distributed, as I recall, only in svn), the invocation turns out to be
this, for tex.1:
groff -man -t -rS11 man1/tex.1 | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp && mv man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp man1/tex.man1.pdf || rm man1/tex.man1.pdf.tmp

Which looks more complicated than it is, since half of it is worrying
about the unlikely case when the groff|ps2pdf pipe fails. The short
form, running in the directory with the man page, would be:
groff -man -t -rS11 tex.1 | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - tex.man1.pdf

A few man pages require extra UTF-8 handling. You can look those up in
man1/Makefile if you care. --hope this helps, karl.