DOCBOOK-APPS: instant(1), and collapsing white space

[Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org>]

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Anyone here still using instant(1)?

I'm writing a transpec to convert DocBook to the doc *roff macro
package.  For those not familiar with this package, it's an alternative
for writing man pages in *roff that concentrate on semantic markup where
possible.  .Pa for paths, .Ev for environment variables, .Ar for
arguments, and so on.

In this respect, it's quite similar to DocBook.  instant(1) parses the
ESIS output from nsgmls.

The problem I'm having is that nsgmls outputs all the white space in the
original document as part of the ESIS, so if you write:

    <para><command>apropos</command> searches a set of database files
      containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and
      displays the result on the standard output.</para>

you get all that leading white space in the output, which fouls up the
man page.

Does anyone know how to turn this behaviour off?  After going through
the instant(1) and nsgmls(1) man pages I can't see anything that looks
like it might do it, but I thought it worth a shot on the 'net.

N
--=20
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve             http://www.freebsd.org/
FreeBSD Documentation Project           http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/

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