doclifter does not recognise mm macro files

[LukeKendall]

I have a lot of troff/mm files. doclifter recognises none of them as mm files. All are named with a .mm suffx. It always reports this error:
doclifter: no macro set recognized
It does it even for extremely simple mm-macro files. e.g this one called simple.mm:

.S 14 16
.H 1 "Heading"
.P
.ce
\fBSome bold text\fR

$ doclifter simple.mm
doclifter: no macro set recognized
$ dpkg -l | grep doclifter
ii doclifter 2.3-2ubuntu1

[Eric S. Raymond (esr-thyrsus)]

I'm doclifter's author.

doclifter doesn't use file extensions to identify macro sets, that isn't reliable enough. Instead it looks for macros that are unique to the set. To trigger mm processing, it wants to see one
of the following: .MT, .SA, or .COVER.

Try adding one of these to each document you want to convert.

[LukeKendall (luke-zeta)]

I can try using .SA 0 or .SA 1 as appropriate. .MT I can't use as I don't want any of its settings interfering with my own settings. I don't know what .COVER does (all my docs and experience with mm is old-school).

Re-reading the doclifter man page, I see that it only implies that it uses the file suffix: it just says that it won't recognise an mm file unless the file (also) has a .mm extension. I quote:

       For a document to be recognized as containing mm markup, it must have
       the extension .mm. This avoids problems with false positives.

It would be good to document in the man page the heuristics that you do use for mm detection (.SA, .MT, .COVER). None of the documents I've written, over a period of decades, has ever used any of these, so I would never have guessed without your information.

What do you think of the idea of adding an explicit argument that tells doclifter what macro package it should use, and thus remove the guesswork? Just like troff had.

Thanks for the follow-up - at least now I know what to try.