1 ************************************************************************
2 * Official mandoc TODO.
3 * $Id: TODO,v 1.176 2014/08/09 14:24:53 schwarze Exp $
4 ************************************************************************
6 ************************************************************************
8 ************************************************************************
10 - The abort() in bufcat(), html.c, can be triggered via buffmt_includes()
11 by running -Thtml -Oincludes on a file containing a long .In argument.
12 Fixing this will probably require reworking the whole bufcat() concept.
14 ************************************************************************
16 ************************************************************************
18 --- missing roff features ----------------------------------------------
20 - .ad (adjust margins)
21 .ad l -- adjust left margin only (flush left)
22 .ad r -- adjust right margin only (flush right)
23 .ad c -- center text on line
24 .ad b -- adjust both margins (alias: .ad n)
25 .na -- temporarily disable adjustment without changing the mode
26 .ad -- re-enable adjustment without changing the mode
27 Adjustment mode is ignored while in no-fill mode (.nf).
30 found by naddy@ in xloadimage(1)
32 - .nr third argument (auto-increment step size, requires \n+)
33 found by bentley@ in sbcl(1) Mon, 9 Dec 2013 18:36:57 -0700
35 - .ns (no-space mode) occurs in xine-config(1)
36 reported by brad@ Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:45:23 -0500
38 - .ta (tab settings) occurs in ircbug(1) and probably gnats(1)
39 reported by brad@ Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:50:51 -0500
40 also Tcl_NewStringObj(3) via wiz@ Wed, 5 Mar 2014 22:27:43 +0100
42 - .ti (temporary indent)
43 found by naddy@ in xloadimage(1)
44 found by bentley@ in nmh(1) Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:38:28 -0600
47 found by jca@ in ratpoison(1) Sun, 30 Jun 2013 12:01:09 +0200
49 - \c (interrupted text) should prevent the line break
50 even inside .Bd literal; that occurs in chat(8)
51 also found in cclive(1) - DocBook output
54 found in cclive(1) DocBook output
55 Anthony J. Bentley on discuss@ Sat, 21 Sep 2013 22:29:34 -0600
57 - \n+ and \n- numerical register increment and decrement
58 found by bentley@ in sbcl(1) Mon, 9 Dec 2013 18:36:57 -0700
60 - \w'' width measurements
61 would not be very useful without an expression parser, see below
62 needed for Tcl_NewStringObj(3) via wiz@ Wed, 5 Mar 2014 22:27:43 +0100
64 - using undefined strings or macros defines them to be empty
65 wl@ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:37:01 +0000
67 --- missing mdoc features ----------------------------------------------
69 - fix bad block nesting involving multiple identical explicit blocks
70 see the OpenBSD mdoc_macro.c 1.47 commit message
72 - .Bl -column .Xo support is missing
74 restore .Xr and .Dv to
75 lib/libc/compat-43/sigvec.3
77 lib/libc/sys/sigaction.2
79 - edge case: decide how to deal with blk_full bad nesting, e.g.
80 .Sh .Nm .Bk .Nm .Ek .Sh found by jmc@ in ssh-keygen(1)
81 from jmc@ Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:10:32 +0100
83 - \\ is now implemented correctly
84 * when defining strings and macros using .ds and .de
85 * when parsing roff(7) and man(7) macro arguments
86 It does not yet work in mdoc(7) macro arguments
87 because libmdoc does not yet use mandoc_getarg().
88 Also check what happens in plain text, it must be identical to \e.
90 - .Bd -centered implies -filled, not -unfilled, which is not
91 easy to implement; it requires code similar to .ce, which
93 Besides, groff has bug causing text right *before* .Bd -centered
94 to be centered as well.
96 - .Bd -filled should not be the same as .Bd -ragged, but align both
97 the left and right margin. In groff, it is implemented in terms
98 of .ad b, which we don't have either. Found in cksum(1).
100 - implement blank `Bl -column', such as
105 - explicitly disallow nested `Bl -column', which would clobber internal
106 flags defined for struct mdoc_macro
108 - In .Bl -column .It, the end of the line probably has to be regarded
109 as an implicit .Ta, if there could be one, see the following mildly
110 ugly code from login.conf(5):
111 .Bl -column minpasswordlen program xetcxmotd
112 .It path Ta path Ta value of Dv _PATH_DEFPATH
115 reported by Michal Mazurek <akfaew at jasminek dot net>
116 via jmc@ Thu, 7 Apr 2011 16:00:53 +0059
118 - inside `.Bl -column' phrases, punctuation is handled like normal
119 text, e.g. `.Bl -column .It Fl x . Ta ...' should give "-x -."
121 - inside `.Bl -column' phrases, TERMP_IGNDELIM handling by `Pf'
122 is not safe, e.g. `.Bl -column .It Pf a b .' gives "ab."
123 but should give "ab ."
125 - set a meaningful default if no `Bl' list type is assigned
127 - have a blank `It' head for `Bl -tag' not puke
129 - check whether it is correct that `D1' uses INDENT+1;
130 does it need its own constant?
132 - prohibit `Nm' from having non-text HEAD children
133 (e.g., NetBSD mDNSShared/dns-sd.1)
134 (mdoc_html.c and mdoc_term.c `Nm' handlers can be slightly simplified)
136 - support translated section names
137 e.g. x11/scrotwm scrotwm_es.1:21:2: error: NAME section must be first
138 that one uses NOMBRE because it is spanish...
139 deraadt tends to think that section-dependent macro behaviour
140 is a bad idea in the first place, so this may be irrelevant
142 - When there is free text in the SYNOPSIS and that free text contains
143 the .Nm macro, groff somehow understands to treat the .Nm as an in-line
144 macro, while mandoc treats it as a block macro and breaks the line.
145 No idea how the logic for distinguishing in-line and block instances
146 should be, needs investigation.
147 uqs@ Thu, 2 Jun 2011 11:03:51 +0200
148 uqs@ Thu, 2 Jun 2011 11:33:35 +0200
150 --- missing man features -----------------------------------------------
152 - -T[x]html doesn't stipulate non-collapsing spaces in literal mode
154 --- missing tbl features -----------------------------------------------
156 - look at the POSIX manuals in the books/man-pages-posix port,
157 they use some unsupported tbl(7) features.
159 - investigate tbl(1) errors in sox(1)
160 see also naddy@ Sat, 16 Oct 2010 23:51:57 +0200
162 - allow standalone `.' to be interpreted as an end-of-layout
163 delimiter instead of being thrown away as a no-op roff line
164 reported by Yuri Pankov, Wed 18 May 2011 11:34:59 CEST
166 --- missing misc features ----------------------------------------------
168 - italic correction (\/) in PostScript mode
169 Werner LEMBERG on groff at gnu dot org Sun, 10 Nov 2013 12:47:46
171 - When makewhatis(8) encounters a FATAL parse error,
172 it silently treats the file as formatted, which makes no sense
173 at all for paths like man1/foo.1 - and which also contradicts
174 what the manual says at the end of the description.
175 The end result will be ENOENT for file names returned
176 by mansearch() in manpage.file.
178 - makewhatis(8) for preformatted pages:
179 parse the section number from the header line
180 and compare to the section number from the directory name
182 - Does makewhatis(8) detect missing NAME sections, missing names,
183 and missing descriptions in all the file formats?
185 - clean up escape sequence handling, creating three classes:
186 (1) fully implemented, or parsed and ignored without loss of content
187 (2) unimplemented, potentially causing loss of content
188 or serious mangling of formatting (e.g. \n) -> ERROR
189 see textproc/mgdiff(1) for nice examples
190 (3) undefined, just output the character -> perhaps WARNING
192 - kettenis wants base roff, ms, and me Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:13:15 +0100 (CET)
194 --- compatibility checks -----------------------------------------------
196 - is .Bk implemented correctly in modern groff?
197 sobrado@ Tue, 19 Apr 2011 22:12:55 +0200
199 - compare output to Heirloom roff, Solaris roff, and
200 http://repo.or.cz/w/neatroff.git http://litcave.rudi.ir/
202 - look at pages generated from reStructeredText, e.g. devel/mercurial hg(1)
203 These are a weird mixture of man(7) and custom autogenerated low-level
204 roff stuff. Figure out to what extent we can cope.
205 For details, see http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
206 noted by stsp@ Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:17:55 +0200
207 reminded by nicm@ Mon, 3 May 2010 09:52:41 +0100
209 - look at pages generated from ronn(1) github.com/rtomayko/ronn
212 - look at pages generated from Texinfo source by yat2m, e.g. security/gnupg
213 First impression is not that bad.
215 - look at pages generated by pandoc; see
216 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/master/src/Text/Pandoc/Writers/Man.hs
217 porting planned by kili@ Thu, 19 Jun 2014 19:46:28 +0200
219 - check compatibility with Plan9:
220 http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/tmac/tmac.an
221 http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man7/man.html
222 "Anthony J. Bentley" <anthonyjbentley@gmail.com> 28 Dec 2010 21:58:40 -0700
224 - check compatibility with the man(7) formatter
225 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rofl0r/hardcore-utils/master/man.c
227 ************************************************************************
228 * formatting issues: ugly output
229 ************************************************************************
231 - a column list with blank `Ta' cells triggers a spurrious
232 start-with-whitespace printing of a newline
235 .It Em Authentication<tab>Key Length
236 ought to render "Key Length" with emphasis, too,
237 see OpenBSD iked.conf(5).
238 reported again Nicolas Joly via wiz@ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:20:00 +0200
240 - empty phrases in .Bl column produce too few blanks
241 try e.g. .Bl -column It Ta Ta
242 reported by millert Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:13:46 -0400
244 - .%T can have trailing punctuation. Currently, it puts the trailing
245 punctuation into a trailing MDOC_TEXT element inside its own scope.
246 That element should rather be outside its scope, such that the
247 punctuation does not get underlines. This is not trivial to
248 implement because .%T then needs some features of in_line_eoln() -
249 slurp all arguments into one single text element - and one feature
250 of in_line() - put trailing punctuation out of scope.
251 Found in mount_nfs(8) and exports(5), search for "Appendix".
253 - Trailing punctuation after .%T triggers EOS spacing, at least
254 outside .Rs (eek!). Simply setting ARGSFL_DELIM for .%T is not
255 the right solution, it sends mandoc into an endless loop.
256 reported by Nicolas Joly Sat, 17 Nov 2012 11:49:54 +0100
258 - global variables in the SYNOPSIS of section 3 pages
259 .Vt vs .Vt/.Va vs .Ft/.Va vs .Ft/.Fa ...
260 from kristaps@ Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:13:32 +0200
262 - in enclosures, mandoc sometimes fancies a bogus end of sentence
263 reminded by jmc@ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:13:39 +0059
265 - formatting /usr/local/man/man1/latex2man.1 with groff and mandoc
266 reveals lots of bugs both in groff and mandoc...
267 reported by bentley@ Wed, 22 May 2013 23:49:30 -0600
269 --- PDF issues ---------------------------------------------------------
271 - PDF output doesn't use a monospaced font for .Bd -literal
272 Example: "mandoc -Tpdf afterboot.8 > output.pdf && pdfviewer output.pdf".
273 Search the text "Routing tables".
274 Also check what PostScript mode does when fixing this.
275 reported by juanfra@ Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:44:58 +0200
277 --- HTML issues --------------------------------------------------------
279 - <dl><dt><dd> formatting is ugly
280 hints are easy to find on the web, e.g.
281 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1713048/
282 see also matthew@ Fri, 18 Jul 2014 19:25:12 -0700
284 - check https://github.com/trentm/mdocml
286 ************************************************************************
287 * formatting issues: gratuitous differences
288 ************************************************************************
290 - .Rv (and probably .Ex) print different text if an `Nm' has been named
291 or not (run a manual without `Nm blah' to see this). I'm not sure
292 that this exists in the wild, but it's still an error.
294 - In .Bl -bullet, the groff bullet is "+\b+\bo\bo", the mandoc bullet
296 see for example OpenBSD ksh(1)
298 - In .Bl -enum -width 0n, groff continues one the same line after
299 the number, mandoc breaks the line.
300 mail to kristaps@ Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:21:39 +0200
302 - .Pp between two .It in .Bl -column should produce one,
303 not two blank lines, see e.g. login.conf(5).
304 reported by jmc@ Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:04:58 +0059
305 reported again by sthen@ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:09:39 +0000 (UTC)
307 - If the *first* line after .It is .Pp, break the line right after
308 the tag, do not pad with space characters before breaking.
309 See the description of the a, c, and i commands in sed(1).
311 - If the first line after .It is .D1, do not assert a blank line
312 in between, see for example tmux(1).
313 reported by nicm@ 13 Jan 2011 00:18:57 +0000
315 - Trailing punctuation after .It should trigger EOS spacing.
316 reported by Nicolas Joly Sat, 17 Nov 2012 11:49:54 +0100
317 Probably, this should be fixed somewhere in termp_it_pre(), not sure.
320 should be "NetBSD 1.0A", not "NetBSD 1.0a",
321 see OpenBSD ccdconfig(8).
323 - In .Bl -tag, if a tag exceeds the right margin and must be continued
324 on the next line, it must be indented by -width, not width+1;
325 see "rule block|pass" in OpenBSD ifconfig(8).
327 - When the -width string contains macros, the macros must be rendered
328 before measuring the width, for example
329 .Bl -tag -width ".Dv message"
330 in magic(5), located in src/usr.bin/file, is the same
331 as -width 7n, not -width 11n.
332 The same applies to .Bl -column column widths;
333 reported again by Nicolas Joly Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:41:26 +0100 via wiz@ 5 Mar
334 reported again by Franco Fichtner Fri, 27 Sep 2013 21:02:28 +0200
335 An easy partial fix would be to just skip the first word if it starts
336 with a dot, including any following white space, when measuring.
338 - The \& zero-width character counts as output.
339 That is, when it is alone on a line between two .Pp,
340 we want three blank lines, not two as in mandoc.
342 - Header lines of excessive length:
343 Port OpenBSD man_term.c rev. 1.25 to mdoc_term.c
344 and document it in mdoc(7) and man(7) COMPATIBILITY
345 found while talking to Chris Bennett
347 - trailing whitespace must be ignored even when followed by a font escape,
351 operate in batch mode
354 ************************************************************************
356 ************************************************************************
358 - check that MANDOCERR_BADTAB is thrown in the right cases,
359 i.e. when finding a literal tab character in fill mode,
360 and possibly change the wording of the warning message
361 to refer to fill mode, not literal mode
362 See the mail from Werner LEMBERG on the groff list,
363 Fri, 14 Feb 2014 18:54:42 +0100 (CET)
365 - warn about "new sentence, new line"
367 - mandoc_special does not really check the escape sequence,
368 but just the overall format
370 - integrate mdoclint into mandoc ("end-of-line whitespace" thread)
371 from jmc@ Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:12:09 +0100
372 from kristaps@ Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:34:53 +0200
373 from jmc@ Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:45:37 +0059
374 from kristaps@ Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:02:03 +0200
376 - -Tlint parser errors and warnings to stdout
377 to tech@mdocml, naddy@ Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:21:46 +0200
378 wait! kristaps@ Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:12:52 +0200
380 - for system errors, use errno/strerror/warn/err
382 ************************************************************************
383 * documentation issues
384 ************************************************************************
386 - mention hyphenation rules:
387 breaking at letter-letter in text mode (not macro args)
388 proper hyphenation is unimplemented
390 - talk about spacing around delimiters
391 to jmc@, kristaps@ Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:41:27 +0200
393 - mark macros as: page structure domain, manual domain, general text domain
396 - mention /usr/share/misc/mdoc.template in mdoc(7)?
398 ************************************************************************
400 ************************************************************************
402 - Why are we using MAP_SHARED, not MAP_PRIVATE for mmap(2)?
403 How does SQLITE_CONFIG_PAGECACHE actually work? Document it!
404 from kristaps@ Sat, 09 Aug 2014 13:51:36 +0200
406 Several areas can be cleaned up to make mandoc even faster. These are
408 - improve hashing mechanism for macros (quite important: performance)
410 - improve hashing mechanism for characters (not as important)
412 - the PDF file is HUGE: this can be reduced by using relative offsets
414 - instead of re-initialising the roff predefined-strings set before each
415 parse, create a read-only version the first time and copy it
417 ************************************************************************
419 ************************************************************************
421 - We use the input line number at several places to distinguish
422 same-line from different-line input. That plainly doesn't work
423 with user-defined macros, leading to random breakage.
425 - Find better ways to prevent endless loops
426 in roff(7) macro and string expansion.
428 - Finish cleanup of date handling.
429 Decide which formats should be recognized where.
430 Update both mdoc(7) and man(7) documentation.
431 Triggered by Tim van der Molen Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:30:45 +0100
433 - Consider creating some views that will make the database more
434 readable from the sqlite3 shell. Consider using them to
435 abstract from the database structure, too.
436 suggested by espie@ Sat, 19 Apr 2014 14:52:57 +0200