From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
To: Dirk Gouders <dirk@gouders.net>
Cc: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>,
linux-man@vger.kernel.org, groff <groff@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:23:40 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20230417062340.i6o4unour4rgd43u@illithid> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ghfs96kbb4.fsf@gouders.net>
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At 2023-04-11T11:39:11+0200, Dirk Gouders wrote:
[I wrote:]
> > 4. A habit has grown up among man(1) programs and pagers to call
> > for and support, respectively, a "blank line squeezing" feature: any
> > runs of more than one blank line are condensed to 1 blank line each.
> > In groff 1.23.0, this will no longer be necessary when continuously
> > rendering. (Historically, this squeezing feature was used to
> > "tighten up" vertical space after the page header, prior to the
> > "NAME" section heading of the document.) In my opinion, pager
> > programs should perform as few transformations as possible on the
> > output of grotty(1), the groff output driver that supports terminal
> > devices. The long-time author and maintainer of less(1) does not
> > agree, so you have to call that program with its "-R" flag to view
> > grotty(1) output as groff intends it. (To see what those intentions
> > are, format the document without paging it.)
>
> Thank you for the detailled assessment. Perhaps my misunderstanding
> is because I'm not a native speaker but which document should I format
> to see what those intentions are?
Just about any man page will do. By "intentions" I mean things like
typeface changes and, in the forthcoming groff 1.23.0,[1] OSC 8 escape
sequences to encode hyperlinks.
For instance, if I want to look at groff_man(7)'s man page without the
intermediation of man(1) or a pager, I can do this.
$ man -w groff_man # to tell me where the document is installed
/usr/share/man/man7/groff_man.7.gz
$ zcat $(!!) | nroff -t -mandoc
I recommend the above as an early troubleshooting step with rendering
problems, though your terminal emulator may need a lot of scrollback
buffer, depending on the document.
(On rare occasions, a document may require a preprocessor other than
tbl(1), but the parts that use them generally won't produce good (eqn)
or any (pic) results on terminal devices. "-t -mandoc" should suffice
for well over 95% of man pages.)
> > Since I flogged groff 1.23.0 three times in this email, I suppose I
> > should point people to where they can get the 1.23.0.rc3 release
> > candidate source archive. Feedback would be appreciated.
>
> Oh well, I didn't measure it but I spent quite some time to work on
> doc/lsp-help.1 and try to find a solution for that "nasty empty line"
> that appeared in of the tables that I use for the online help -- I was
> convinced it was my fault.
I am sure a lot of people thought that. I was quite pleased to track
down and stomp that bug.
> Gentoo already has an ebuild for groff-1.23.0-rc3 and simply using
> this fixes that problem in the table. So, from now on all my testing
> happens with groff-1.23.0-rc3 and I will report should I recognize
> problems.
Please do. Bruno Haible has found a passel of portability problems to
non-GNU/Linux systems, and helped us to resolve several of them; I am
hopeful that 1.23.0 will be the most easily deployed groff in quite some
time.
Regards,
Branden
[1] We just tagged and put out 1.23.0.rc4 this past weekend.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-04/msg00135.html
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-04-17 6:23 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 73+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-03-25 20:37 Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-03-25 20:47 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-04 23:45 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-05 5:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 1:10 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 8:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:48 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 22:01 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 7:05 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 13:02 ` Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 16:06 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:47 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 15:42 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 19:48 ` Accessibility of man pages Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 20:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 20:46 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 21:53 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 22:33 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 10:28 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-08 20:31 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-08 20:59 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 22:39 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-09 9:50 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-09 10:35 ` Dirk Gouders
[not found] ` <87a5zhwntt.fsf@ada>
2023-04-09 12:05 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 12:17 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 18:55 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-09 12:29 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-09 13:36 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 13:47 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 8:13 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Sam James
2023-04-12 8:32 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 10:35 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 10:55 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 13:04 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Kerin Millar
2023-04-12 14:24 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-12 18:52 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 20:23 ` Compressed man pages Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-13 10:09 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 2:18 ` Playground pager lsp(1) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 6:36 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 11:03 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 14:43 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 15:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 15:08 ` Larry McVoy
2023-04-07 17:07 ` man page rendering speed Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-07 19:04 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 19:28 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 20:43 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 16:08 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 11:24 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 21:26 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH " Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 22:09 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH Dirk Gouders
2023-04-07 22:16 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 19:05 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-10 19:57 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 20:24 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-11 9:20 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-11 9:39 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-17 6:23 ` G. Branden Robinson [this message]
2023-04-08 11:40 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-05 10:02 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 14:19 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-05 18:01 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 19:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-05 19:56 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 20:38 ` A less presumptive .info? (was: Re: Playground pager lsp(1)) Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 8:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:56 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 13:14 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 1:31 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 6:01 ` Dirk Gouders
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