Jason McIntyre <j...@kerhand.co.uk> writes: > On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 11:34:53PM +0200, Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas wrote: >> Jason McIntyre <j...@kerhand.co.uk> writes: >> >> > On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 07:53:04PM +0200, Jan Stary wrote: >> >> Some of the manpages, e.g. crontab(1), >> >> markup the folklore phrase >> >> >> >> named file, or standard input >> >> if the pseudo-filename `-' is given >> >> >> >> as >> >> >> >> named file, or standard input >> >> if the pseudo-filename >> >> .Sq Fl >> >> is given. >> >> >> >> Is this correct semantic markup? IMHO not: >> >> it just abuses the fact that the flags (Fl) >> >> happen to start with a dash; but that's not >> >> what is meant here; this is not a flag; >> >> it is the literal dash that is recognized >> >> in place of a filename. >> >> Then it is an argument (Ar). >> > not really. Ar represents an argument name - this is a literal > argument.
That makes sense. > it should therefore be Li, but because the markup on a single > character is hard to spot, we use Sq. there is a Ql macro which "does > the right thing", but the effect would be the same as using Sq. Sq is > probably best, i think. > >> >> So I believe it should be simply >> >> >> >> .Sq - >> >> >> >> Right? >> >> See below. >> >> >> The diff below replaces those occurences >> >> that a grep revealed for me in /usr/share/man; >> >> Another grep reveals that most other manpages >> >> actually use ".Sq -". >> >> >> >> I left out oldrdist(1) and shutdown(8) >> >> where it _is_ actually a flag >> >> and the code processes it as such. >> >> >> >> Jan >> >> >> > >> > ok, i agree with this. Fl seems wrong. however there's some ambiguity, >> > for me anyway - do oldrdist and shutdown actually process "-" >> > differently, or do the manuals talk about them differently? >> >> Fl may seem wrong because we're talking about an argument, but I don't >> think a bare `-' (a hyphen) would be better. We're talking about an >> ascii minus sign here; mandoc_char(7) says a minus sign can be obtained >> with \- . >> > > it's not a minus sign. it's a literal "-". I was thinking encoding-wise: you're typing an ascii minus sign, at the cli. If you have a man/mdoc formatter that distinguishes hyphens and minus signs, it could produce different output for those, and you would not be able to copy-paste examples. Maybe mandoc doesn't, but groff can (some distros even disabled this behavior). >> I wonder about cat(1) using >> .Pq Sq \&- >> is that really telling mandoc to treat it as a minus sign? >> >> What about: >> .Pq Sq Ar \- >> > > the \& is wrong, yes. but so is Ar > [...] -- Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas PGP Key fingerprint: 61DB D9A0 00A4 67CF 2A90 8961 6191 8FBF 06A1 1494
