Hi Larry, Larry Kollar wrote on Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 10:44:43AM -0400:
> I'm in violent agreement with your and Brandon's assessment > of all-caps headings. Shoot, there aren't many > terminal programs that *can't* do bold these days; > I think even that VT220 I keep > planning to connect to my iMac can do it. > > Given a choice, I never all-caps my manpage headings. Not a real problem, your pages are still readable and correct - and you argue they are even more readable and nicer. Fair enough. Some parsers may warn, including mandoc: mandoc: <stdin>:1:5: STYLE: lower case character in document title: Dt foo mandoc: <stdin>:1:5: STYLE: lower case character in document title: TH foo But it's only flagged as a STYLE level issue, meaning that there is no ambiguity, portability, or formatting problem. > I've succumbed to convention once or twice, maybe. > It would be cool if man(1) could recognize an all-caps string > flush left, and turn it into bolded title case. Err, no, serious layering violation alert. In implementations were the formatter and man(1) are separate programs, the man(1) utility should please *not* try to change the formatting, not even in a well-intentioned way. It should only display the rendered version it got, unchanged. The formatter can't do the tranformation either: once the case of some string was clobbered into ALL CAPS, going back programmatically is impossible, information was lost. For example, the OpenBSD ipsec.conf(5) manual contains .Sh IPSEC.CONF FILE FORMAT and it might contain .Sh IPSEC AUTOMATIC KEYING No formatter can figure out that the correct capitalization is .Sh ipsec.conf file format .Sh IPsec automatic keying I'm not necessarily opposed to getting rid of this antiquated convention (though i would have to check with Jason, who sometimes is aware of arguments that i miss), except that i would probably be the poor guy who would have to edit thousands of manual pages, a process that can only partly be automated and certainly requires checking all of them by hand. You will understand that while i see the point why the convention is not good - and even worse for .TH and .Dt than for .Sh - i'm not thrilled by the idea of getting rid of it so late in the game, for the sheer volume of churn it would cause. Yours, Ingo
