Re: groff warning: TE macro called with TW register undefined

[Hugh McMaster <hugh.mcmaster@outlook.com>]

Hi Colin,

On Tue, 15 Aug 2023 at 23:55, Colin Watson wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 10:46:30PM +1000, Hugh McMaster wrote:
> > Lintian has recently started emitting this groff warning for ftlint.1
> > in freetype-demos as part of its man pages check:
> >
> > groff-message an.tmac:<standard input>:66: warning: tbl preprocessor
> > failed, or it or soelim was not run; table(s) likely not rendered (TE
> > macro called with TW register undefined)
>
> I haven't looked at your code in detail, but this sounds similar to
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1042358.  groff is most likely observing that
> you're using the tbl macros but haven't invoked groff with -t, which
> means any warnings it issues are going to be inaccurate representations
> of how pages are actually rendered in practice.  Your starting point
> should be to add -t to the groff command line in this check, and then
> see what else shows up after that.

It is similar, yes, but unfortunately, I'm working with a hand-crafted
man page file.