Re: [BUG] Hyperlink macros: breaking should conserve the full hyperlink

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi, Alex!

At 2022-02-08T00:19:40+0100, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> Huh, now I realize that thunderbird(1) broke my correct man(7) source
> code.  I wrote the URI in the same line as .UR, but the $#!^! mailer
> broke it into two lines :(

Yes, and the list archive software at gnu.org merrily does the same
thing, including to my mail you quoted with all the examples.[1]  :(

Because people would rather read incorrect content than deal with a
horizontal scroll bar, still in this age of gestural drag scrolling.

:-|

> We were defending the same thing.

Oh.  Good!  8-D

[begin TWO LINES ONLY of quoted content]
> > contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man:.UR 
> > http://\:www\:.schaffter\:.ca/\:mom/\:momdoc/\:toc\:.html
> > contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man-.UE
[end TWO LINES ONLY]

> This one is what I was using.

Yes, that's exactly what's envisioned and recommended by the macros.  As
I understand it--they antedate my arrival to the groff list by 10 years.

> > If we can find some cases where groff is emitting hyperlinks that it
> > shouldn't, I'm keen to fix those, but we don't have any power to
> > keep a terminal emulator from opportunistically hyperlinking text
> > that _looks_ like a URL to it.  To verify this, you can check the
> > device-independent output of troff(1) by giving groff(1) the -Z
> > option.  You will get plain text output that may look bewildering at
> > first; it is documented in groff_out(5).  For our immediate
> > purposes, just grep it or visually scan for lines like this:
> > 
> > x X tty: link http://www.multicians.org/
> > x X tty: link
> 
> Oh, I thought that it was groff(1) emitting those hyperlinks.

Well, in the hand-wavy sense that groff(1) calls "troff | grotty", it
_is_.

> I now remember a recent discussiion, and that that is probably
> disabled by default [and I don't care enough (yet) to recompile
> groff(1)].  No problem then :)

You don't need to recompile groff to turn them on.  Just edit man.local
(the groff_man(7) page should document its "./configured" directory in
the page's "Files" section), or remember to add "-rU1" to your command
lines.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-02/msg00028.html

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