Re: [Groff] The future redux

[Deri James]

On Wed 26 Feb 2014 13:46:22 Walter Alejandro Iglesias wrote:
> What do you want in a man page?  Videos?  3D holograms?

Only if they would help give an answer to the question you are trying to 
answer!

> XTerm does not constrain nothing.  It does what is expected from a 
terminal.
> Do you think your lawnmower needs a fix because you can take a ride on 
it?
> It's not a motorcycle.

It probably depends on the size of the lawn.

> Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals, they're just an
> aide-mémomire. It takes more time to open Okular than reading what 
you
> need!

A simple, but completely unreliable, test, just opening a man page with 
and without okular:-

address@hidden ~]$ time man df

real    0m1.577s
user    0m0.033s
sys     0m0.008s

address@hidden ~]$ time man -t df

real    0m1.863s
user    0m0.483s
sys     0m0.064s

The unreliability is down to the speed I can press Q or Alt-F4, but it does 
show that you are correct that okular is slower to start, by about .3 of a 
second. Of course, if you are not already in a KDE environment, then the 
start time for okular would include the whole kde stack, making it very slow 
indeed. If such is the case, and, since you are using xterm rather than 
konsole, it probably is, then perhaps using xpdf rather than okular would 
improve your experience.

> Seriously guys, you need a big dose of Common Sense.

My post was intended to point out that groff (rather than nroff) is still 
useful for man pages, for people who find it easier to read if the content is 
typographically superior to reading terminal text. My mistake was to not 
mention that other pdf readers may be more suitable for individual 
setups.It may be necessary to alter the man.config command I gave for 
other pdf readers.

Cheers 

Deri