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Old 9th November 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
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I don't know what to say about the .br issues. Usually you can intersperse troff commands with the macro packages, with some limitations. It depends on how the macro package is written. Since I've not used the man page macros, I'm afraid I can't offer many useful alternatives.

If you want to learn troff better, here is a place to look:

http://www.troff.org/papers.html

I'd suggest you start with the -ms macro package, as it is very simple and covers most of the practical document formatting requirements. From there, move to the preprocessors: tbl (for tables), eqn (for complicated math), pic (for line drawings), grap (for graphs), refer (for references) and chem (for chemistry). I don't think that chem is part of any of the BSDs -- I did a port for FreeBSD if you want it. Also keep in mind that groff has some extensions that are not part of the documentation, like .PSPIC to insert graphics elements into documents (in .eps format).

Also you might be interested in the TeX/troff thread that has popped up.
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