Re: [groff] Spooky action at a distance in line adjustment...sometimes

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Ralph,

Ralph Corderoy wrote on Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 12:39:47PM +0100:
> Doug McIlroy wrote:

>> But it soon became old hat and people migrated back to ragged right
>> margins, which may not look as neat from afar, but also seem to be
>> easier to read both because of even spacing and because the variable
>> margin provides distinguishablility to help a reader track vertical
>> position on the page.

> Right.  That's why I have `--nj' in the MANOPT environment variable.
> I'm surprised more distributions don't turn off justification by default
> as most users are unaware that man(1) might have a configuration option.
> Colin?
> 
> (I also have `--nh' to turn off hyphenation too as I'd rather the word
> not be split for ease of reading than maintain an ideal line length.)

It's not that few, actually.  Given that mandoc(1) has both
justification and hyphenation off by default and does not even
support either via options (not so much due to lazyness to implement
it, more because we believe in keeping the user interface as simple
as possible and in avoiding options that provide relatively little
value), here is the minimum list of systems having justification
and hyphenation off in manual page display:

 * FreeBSD
 * OpenBSD
 * NetBSD
 * illumos with all its distributions
 * Alpine Linux
 * Void Linux
 * plus any that use groff by default and disable the features anyway

Yours,
  Ingo