R help - Jun 2003 - Query: Sd2Rd and nroff macros in S docs

Documentation for S3 functions is apparently written in troff markup
with macro tags like

  .BG  .FN  .TL  .DN  .CS  ...

Inspection of S3 documentation source files gives a pretty clear idea
of what these mean, semantically (and Sd2Rd is a perl script which
converts this markup into the Rd format, providing further semantic
information along the way).

My query is: Can anyone point to troff macro definitions for these tags?

(And, preferably, also to descriptions for their usage)

With thanks,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 18-Jun-03                                       Time: 07:53:36
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
> Documentation for S3 functions is apparently written in troff markup
> with macro tags like
> 
>   .BG  .FN  .TL  .DN  .CS  ...
> 
> Inspection of S3 documentation source files gives a pretty clear idea
> of what these mean, semantically (and Sd2Rd is a perl script which
> converts this markup into the Rd format, providing further semantic
> information along the way).
> 
> My query is: Can anyone point to troff macro definitions for these tags?
You need to look in an S3 Unix system for that: they are presumably
copyright AT&T.  Look in the file SHOME/cmd/help.nr.
> (And, preferably, also to descriptions for their usage)
That's harder.  There have been some partial descriptions in long-obselete 
S-PLUS manuals.

Why do you want to do this?  The last system that used such markup was
S-PLUS 3.4, released in about 1996 as I recall.  (You might do better 
asking S questions on S-news?)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595