[docutils:bugs] #477 Generated man page leads to groff warning "TE macro called with TW register undefined"

the title is misleading and the solution looks like something was dropped on the keyboard

on my system "man 7 man" says
~~~
   Title line
       The  first command in a man page (after comment lines, that is, lines that start
       with .\") should be

              .TH title section date source manual
~~~
I had to move a lot of lines before .TH because indexers had problems
and I will add this droplet too, BUT please is there anyone considering
the fact that a manual-system should be less cryptic

and the page might be in need of a cleanup, it also says
~~~
       Many  man pages begin with '\" followed by a space and a list of characters, indicating how the page is to be preprocessed.  For  portability’s  sake  to  non-troff  translators we recommend that you avoid using anything other than tbl(1),
       and Linux can detect that automatically.
~~~
then the fact that the apostrophe and the dot are the same comes up at sometime ...

i guess carnival season never ended for centuries.



---

**[bugs:#477] Generated man page leads to groff warning "TE macro called with TW register undefined"**

**Status:** open
**Labels:** manpage writer 
**Created:** Sun Nov 12, 2023 06:15 PM UTC by Dmitry Shachnev
**Last Updated:** Sun Nov 12, 2023 09:02 PM UTC
**Owner:** engelbert gruber


In Debian, we have a `lintian` tool which runs various checks on the built packages. Among other things, it makes sure that man pages explicitly require all preprocessors that they need.

I have received a [bug](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1053355) about an error reported by that tool. It looks like that if a document contains a table, `rst2man` generates macros `.TS` and `.TE` which are recognized by [tbl](https://manpages.debian.org/testing/groff-base/tbl.1.en.html) preprocessor, but does not generate a dependency on it.

Here is a minimal reproducing example:
```
$ cat table.rst
.. list-table::

   * - Foo
     - Bar
$ rst2man table.rst | MANROFFSEQ='' man -l -Z - >/dev/null
an.tmac:<standard input>:43: warning: tbl preprocessor failed, or it or soelim was not run; table(s) likely not rendered (TE macro called with TW register undefined)
```

According to [this email](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/08/msg00220.html), to fix this error, `rst2man` should add this line on top of the generated man page:

    '\" t

Cc @branden — I think you are interested in all manpage-related issues.


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