[CC list brutally trimmed]

At 2021-07-31T13:02:27+0200, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> I think you misunderstood the context here.
> 
> I meant all of that about input, i.e., the text of the patch itself,
> text to be added to a man page source text.
> 
> What I meant is that when you break lines semantically (when writing a
> patch), and initially forget about the 80 (or 75) column right margin,
> most of the lines you write will already (as a side effect of breaking
> lines semantically) be within the 80 (or 75) right margin.
> 
> For those that still don't fit into 80 characters after doing that,
> break further (or at some other point that may also break nicely
> semantically); otherwise, I won't see the text when editing the man
> page on my 80-col terminal.
> 
> For those that still don't fit into 75 characters after doing that,
> consider breaking further, but only if doing so seems easy and lines
> break nicely.  I can still see after line 75, and I can do some effort
> to scroll an email a few columns if needed (when many quotes move the
> text further to the right).  So if the source code would break in a
> weird way because of forcing a 75 col right margin, please ignore that
> margin.
> 
> I hope I was clear this time.

Quite so.  In my experience with the groff man pages (~60 of them), when
you apply the semantic newline rule to commas, colons, and semicolons as
well as sentence-ending punctuation, text lines that exceed 72 columns
are fairly rare.  (I also set multi-word parentheticals on their own
input lines.)

As I've noted elsewhere (in the "intro" PDF I shared the other day,
though I don't think the document made it to the linux-man@
list--filtered, I suspect), if you find yourself crashing past 72
columns when using semantic newlines with ordinary prose, there's a good
chance you need to recast for readability.

From what I've seen, the hardest line length problems the Linux
man-pages project deals with are in non-prose contexts; function
synopses and similar.

> BTW, thanks for your mail.  It wasn't related to what I meant, but was
> interesting :=)

Thank you.  That mitigates my chagrin at talking past the point.  :)

Regards,
Branden