SOELIM

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 17 March 2021
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NAME

soelim - interpret .so requests in groff input

SYNOPSIS

[ -Crtv ] [ -I dir ] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

soelim reads files and replaces lines of the form

: .so~file

by the contents of file. It is useful if files included with .so need to be preprocessed. Normally, soelim should be invoked with the -s option of groff.

To embed '\' in the file name, write '\\' or '\e'. To embed a space, write '\ '. Any other escape sequence in file makes soelim ignore the whole line.

Note that there must be no whitespace between the leading dot and the two characters 's' and 'o'. Otherwise, only groff interprets the .so request (and soelim ignores it).

OPTIONS

Whitespace is permitted between a command-line option and its argument.

-C: Recognize .so even when followed by a character other than space or newline.
-Idir: This option may be used to add a directory to the search path for files (both those on the command line and those named in .so requests). The search path is initialized with the current directory. This option may be specified more than once; the directories are then searched in the order specified (but before the current directory). If you want to make the current directory be read before other directories, add -I. at the appropriate place.
: No directory search is performed for files with an absolute file name.
-r: Do not add .lf requests (for general use, with non-groff files).
-t: Don't emit .lf requests but TeX comment lines (starting with '%') giving the current file and line number.
-v: Print the version number.

USAGE

The normal processing sequence of groff is this:


          input        sourced
          file          file
            |             |
            v             v
        preprocessor -> troff -> postprocessor
                                      |
                                      v
                                   output
                                    file

That is, files sourced with .so are normally read only by troff (the actual formatter). soelim is not required for troff to source files.

If a file to be sourced should also be preprocessed, it must already be read before the input file passes through the preprocessor. This is handled by soelim:


          input
          file
            |
            v
          soelim -> preprocessor -> troff -> postprocessor
            ^                                     |
            |                                     v
         sourced                               output
          file                                  file