Hi Branden, I'll reply to your query about pan-and-zoom transformations in another thread, as I'm preparing a demo/preview to help explain what I mean. =) Just responding to your other points:
> > > > *the forced-full-capitalization of section titles in man page sources is > aninformation-destroying transform done in the wrong place at the > wrongtime. Section headings should be capitalized as section titles > normallyare in technical documentation: either like work titles, or > first-letteronly, with the normal rules for proper nouns and adjectives > respected* I didn't bother explaining this to Ingo as I was shooting him down with his mdoc-shaped abortions of mutated HTML and CSS mashups, and why he should really just shut up about mandoc's "superior HTML output" when a Troff preprocessor could generate more semantically correct and robust output. But you're right. Writing stuff IN ALL CAPS is bad for assistive technologies, because programs like screen-readers have no (sane) way of distinguishing acronyms from, say, shouting or THAT LOUD LAWYER TALK you often see in licenses and T&Cs. That's why CSS has a dedicated property <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-transform> for achieving this effect, without altering the underlying meaning or tone. On 21 April 2018 at 17:06, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com > wrote: > At 2018-04-20T23:19:44+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > >> man://mandoc.1#EXIT_STATUS > > > > > Now, as for the SHOUTY SHOUTY... > > > > That's not a matter of SHOUTING, but of case sensitivity. > > The name of that standard section in man(7) and mdoc(7) > > is "EXIT STATUS", not "Exit Status" nor "Exit status" > > nor "exit status". Case is preserved, consider: > > > That's a bad idea. I admit that many authors use unusual and even > > inconsistent casing in section headers (even in the very mandoc.1)-:, > > which may sometimes seem awkward. But in technical documentation, > > casing is often deliberate, and automatically changing it based on > > natural language rules is prone to make information incorrect in > > some cases. > > I disagree with most of this analysis. As far as I can tell this was a > presentational decision, similar to the one that led to the Unix > trademark being shown in small caps. I don't recall the reference but > the reason was not because Unix was supposed to be in full caps--it's > not an acronym, after all--but just to show off a fancy font on the > typesetter. > > In my opinion, which I am far too young and poorly-connected to have > proffered when it would have made any difference, the > forced-full-capitalization of section titles in man page sources is an > information-destroying transform done in the wrong place at the wrong > time. Section headings should be capitalized as section titles normally > are in technical documentation: either like work titles, or first-letter > only, with the normal rules for proper nouns and adjectives respected. > > It would be better if man-db (or similar) set a *roff variable > that the macro package would check to see if case transformation on > section headings was desired. The default, for the next n years, of > course, would be to go ahead and do the transformation to avoid shocking > people. > > This has been itching me for many years; thanks for the excuse to air > my grievance. ;-) > > -- > Regards, > Branden >