[bug #64018] [man, mdoc] decide on a common base paragraph indentation

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #12, bug #64018 (project groff):

[comment #10 comment #10:]
> Merely ugly.
[...]
> Very ugly though ;-)

Wow, you're not kidding.  That's pretty awful.  But given that the change in
indentation amount is all it took to produce this yuckiness, I would think
there have to be synopses that would be just as horrid with a base paragraph
indentation of 5n.

Possibly, _mdoc_(7) page authors knew this and carefully edited the ones that
did, so that now no one sees them.  But they would have be de-semanticizing
their inputs by sweating formatting details.  Perhaps Ingo will join me in
finding that dubious, even if he hates the changed indentation (which I aim to
change back, and port over to _groff man_(7), in case that wasn't clear).

> These are all with standard 80 columns.
> 
> Sorry, I don’t have a guide… most of the time, it’s the nine-argument
limit (sometimes eight, but I fixed some of these cases), and more rarely
converting \[xx] to \(xx.

Understood.

> There is also an issue with where \& should be placed, which also affects
J�rg Schilling’s systems. We figured out that putting \& after punctuation
*only* for stuff like “e.g.\&” (where you don’t want the american
double-spacing after), and otherwise before (e.g. “\&.” or “\&xx”
where xx is a request name) works best.

I assume you mean `\&.xx` in that last example.

And yes, those two applications have always been intended and expected.

_groff_man_style_(7) says:


    \&  Dummy character.  Insert at the beginning of an input line to
        prevent a dot or apostrophe from being interpreted as beginning
        a roff control line.  Append to an end‐of‐sentence punctuation
        sequence to keep it from being recognized as such.


The [https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/ groff manual] says more.

I remember Joerg well.  If you have any exhibits of *_roff_ input that he
insisted was correct, all other implementations be damned, I'd be curious to
see them. 

> I did add some of the new features to my tmac, like .In to mdoc(7) and the
Xr-like .MR to man(7).

Interesting.  I did not know `In` was a late-breaking macro in the _mdoc_(7)
world.  I (feel that I) have a good grasp of _man_'s history, and a poor one
of _mdoc_'s.

> We cannot, obviously, have three-letter requests.

Nope.  Like I said, there's room for `Cq`, `Co`, and `Cc`.

Thanks for following up!


    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64018>

_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/