t; converting all tables to html should be my optimal goal.
How well does 'mandoc -Thtml' handle your inputs?
--
Anthony J. Bentley
orly written manuals rendered badly. I'm
not convinced the situation is greatly improved, and that means
reverting it is premature. Changing the default, even if it's
something distributions *can* customize, is too big a step until more
concrete work has been done improving existing manpage markup in the
free software ecosystem. People like you and I, overobsessed with
typographic minutiae, should continue our current practice of
rendering in HTML and PDF and inspecting source manually to find these
errors, to save the poor users and their copy-paste. That is what I
think.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
were few alternative means of producing documentation, and
perhaps most importantly, where copy & paste did not exist.
This change visibly and obviously affects tens of thousands of troff
documents in the output format in which they are most often read.
Whatever groff does in the end, I just feel like something with such
an impact deserves some discussion first.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
ot enough of a standards
lawyer to say for sure...
--
Anthony J. Bentley
on use.
They just see that man(1) outputs "weird quotes."
I myself do know the history, I've used many terminal fonts over the
years, and yet none of them display ` ' as directional quotes, not
even xterm's "fixed." They all follow the common, documented practice of
` being grave accent and ' being a straight quote.
There is no sinister motive here to erase the past.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
t, meaning literal '^' has to be
escaped as \(ha. ~ shows up as U+02DC, and literal '~' must be
escaped as \(ti. Many, many document authors are unaware of this
distinction, which makes reading (or worse, searching) such incorrectly
typeset documents as POSIX more than a little grating.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
h.gnu.org/bugs/?43636
--
Anthony J. Bentley
Dave Kemper writes:
> On 4/29/17, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> > Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both
> > right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section
> > of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6.
>
> Yes, and that remains
But when I need an actual
apostrophe, I use ' as-is to take advantage of troff's automatic
conversion. Similarly, I only use " when specifically an ASCII double
quote is needed, such as when referring to C strings, and use
typographic quotes at all other times.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
~, `, and '. Perhaps it would make sense
to change mdoc: make macros that produce fixed-width text skip
converting these characters. Is that a sensible idea? Probably needs a
check against a large manpage corpus to see if it's feasible...
--
Anthony J. Bentley
"Anthony J. Bentley" writes:
> Ingo Schwarze writes:
> > Hi Carsten,
> >
> > Carsten Kunze wrote on Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 01:07:55PM +0100:
> >
> > > in groff_char.7 it is specified that U+0303 is output for \(a~ but
> > > actually
ff's PDF output. In fact, an ASCII tilde gets replaced with a U+0303
in PDF output, and must be escaped as \(ti to output a straight ASCII
tilde. However, UTF-8 nroff(1) output seems to output U+007E for both
\(a~ and ~ inputs.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
ommand flags in -mdoc, so I just type Fl for those. I
wish Fl became ASCII '-', but we're talking about changing decades of
historical practice here.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
d
double quotes.
Should nroff render `` '' as typographical double quotes instead of
literal ASCII values? Maybe, but there's a lot more down that rabbit hole.
Haven't there been discussions about \- (apparently an en dash/minus in
troff, ASCII hyphen-minus in nroff) and - (apparently hyphen in troff,
ASCII hyphen-minus in nroff) before?
--
Anthony J. Bentley
ifically UTF-8 output]. I use UTF-8 terminals and the patch was
intended to improve how the nroff output looks in [the UTF-8] case."
Anyway, I'll drop this line of conversation. It is detracting from both
the point of the patch and the valid tangent Carsten brought up.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
Keith Marshall writes:
> On 06/11/14 12:30, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> > By ASCII I meant specifically ASCII output. I use UTF-8 terminals and
> > the patch was intended to improve how the nroff output looks in that case.
>
> That you use UTF-8 terminals is completel
Hi Carsten,
Carsten Kunze writes:
> "Anthony J. Bentley" wrote:
>
> > It's worth noting that groff's refer(1) already uses typographic quotes
> > around %T with my -ms documents.
>
> Can you please provide some lines of input for refer
Hi Carsten,
Carsten Kunze writes:
> "Anthony J. Bentley" wrote:
>
> > I agree that `` '' makes no sense in modern ASCII; even in an xterm they
> > look unbalanced. " " would probably be a saner ASCII result for Dq,
> > \(lq, \*(Lq, a
Hi Carsten,
Carsten Kunze writes:
> "Anthony J. Bentley" wrote:
>
> > The below patch causes -mdoc to generate typographic quotes around
> > a %T (reference title) instead of straight quotes.
>
> Maybe that should depend on the output format. ``Example
Hi,
The below patch causes -mdoc to generate typographic quotes around
a %T (reference title) instead of straight quotes.
I also submitted similar diffs to mandoc and heirloom troff (which
haven't been committed yet). It would be nice for the major
implementations not to differ here, and the chan
d), and already has thousands of
manpages written in it, why extend -man in a backwards incompatible
manner? Any system which doesn't support -mdoc would certainly not
support these new -man macros.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
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