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To: "G. Branden Robinson" Cc: groff@gnu.org, linux-man , Ingo Schwarze References: <20210912172749.uziql5vofxi7sjth@localhost.localdomain> From: "Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" Message-ID: Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2021 22:09:37 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.13.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20210912172749.uziql5vofxi7sjth@localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-man@vger.kernel.org Hi Branden, On 9/12/21 7:27 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Hi, Alex! > > At 2021-09-12T14:56:39+0200, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: >> Hi Branden, >> >> Usually, when a manual page highlights a term, either in bold or >> italics, it usually is a special identifier (macro, function, command >> name or argument), for which hyphenation can hurt readability and even >> worse, turn it into a different valid identifier. >> >> What about disabling hyphenation for .B and .I? >> Are there any inconveniences in doing so that I can't see? > > The problem that arises is that the font styling macros are > presentational, not semantic, so it's hard to know whether someone is > using them for emphasis or to suggest syntactical information. This is > why you made a statistical argument ("usually"). Truly, even though most cases of .B/.I are identifiers (or literals), some are emphasized words or phrases. I think no identifier should ever be hyphenated, if possible, mainly due to the confusion with other possibly valid identifiers. I'd also argue that for the cases when the writer wants to emphasize a word, hyphenating it does the opposite. The writer wanted it to stand out from the rest, but now it's broken into two incomplete pieces far apart from each other. I think I really want to disable hyphenation everywhere I want a word to stand out from the rest, be it an identifier or just an emphasized word or phrase. Ingo's option of disabling hyphenation _everywhere_ in man pages seems too drastic to me. There's still a lot of prose, and it's not so important there (although I admit both ways have their benefits; not saying it's wrong). But that adds a point against the only downside I can see: disabling hyphenation may (in rare occasions where many long identifiers are together) produce an awkward number of spaces due to filling; but if no-one has complained against mandoc, I guess that's not so terrible or doesn't happen that much. Regards, Alex -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/