Re: [PATCH 4/5] man/captoinfo.1m: Revise.

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-09-25T04:21:37-0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 24, 2023 at 07:40:47PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Yeah, I dithered on that point.  I find use of ACS in the DEC sense
> > tough to square with the use of an encoding with no shift state and
> > no modes.  The whole point of the DEC mechanism, I vaguely grasp,
> > was to be able to switch in partial replacements of the 8-bit code
> > space (GL and GR--that stuff).  My grasp of the details is feeble.
> > ACS might be a separate feature from those...?
> 
> It might - whether it was DEC or AT&T (or BSD) for "acs", I don't
> know.  I was more interested in keyboards than escape sequences in the
> ~1980 time frame.

Apropos of little, I admire the Japanese keyboard layout for its fealty
to the structure of the ASCII character encoding (and I grew up using
similar "bit-paired" layouts).  I'm less enamored of its tiny space bar
and blobby enter key.  The Happy Hacking Keyboard (and erstwhile Sun)
layout is nearly ideal for me.

> > At any rate, I would point out that there's no nesting going on in the
> > "FILES" sections of the ncurses man pages.  I readily concede that the
> > "standard indentation" of 7n/7.2n[2] isn't fit for every application;
> > that's why `RS`, `TP`, and `IP` permit its override.
>
> agreed
>
> > If you could shed some more light on what your concerns are here, I
> > might make better guesses when preparing patches.
> 
> heh - mostly I start hanging indents with TP, then notice that it's
> using a lot of space and then fill in ".TP 5" to cut that down.
> 
> (I've noticed that sometimes TP inherits its parameter from the
> previous use - making the explicit parameter unnecessary - sometimes
> not, but haven't delved into that to see why).

groff_man(7) explains.

       .P
       .LP
       .PP    Begin a new paragraph; these macros are synonymous.  The
              indentation is reset to the default value; the left
              margin, as affected by .RS and .RE, is not.
[...]
   Horizontal and vertical spacing
       The indentation argument accepted by .IP, .TP, and the deprecated
       .HP is a number plus an optional scaling unit, as is .RS’s inset‐
       amount.  If no scaling unit is given, the man package assumes
       “n”.  An indentation specified in a call to .IP, .TP, or the
       deprecated .HP persists until (1) another of these macros is
       called with an indentation argument, or (2) .SH, .SS, or .P or
       its synonyms is called; these clear the indentation entirely.

> In a quick check, I see that I mixed RS/TP 3 in user_caps, probably
> motivated by the relatively short names used in the leading part.

At the very least I can probably help dispose of some redundant macro
argument specification.  :)

Regards,
Branden

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