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

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 04:26:08PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> 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.

For the ConTeXt man pages, I went directly to pdf:

for f in $Master/texmf-dist/doc/context/scripts/mkiv/*.man; do
  echo `basename $f`
  cp $f $Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/man1/`basename $f .man`.1
  man -Tpdf $f >$Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/man1/`basename $f`1.pdf
done

As I recall, only context.man gave me such a warning. The result
have A4 papersize, which is apparently the default on my system.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg