Em Wed, 12 May 2021 18:07:04 +0100
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu:
> On Wed, 2021-05-12 at 14:50 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Such conversion tools - plus some text editor like LibreOffice or similar - have
> > a set of rules that turns some typed ASCII characters into UTF-8 alternatives,
> > for instance converting commas into curly commas and adding non-breakable
> > spaces. All of those are meant to produce better results when the text is
> > displayed in HTML or PDF formats.
>
> And don't we render our documentation into HTML or PDF formats?
Yes.
> Are
> some of those non-breaking spaces not actually *useful* for their
> intended purpose?
No.
The thing is: non-breaking space can cause a lot of problems.
We even had to disable Sphinx usage of non-breaking space for
PDF outputs, as this was causing bad LaTeX/PDF outputs.
See, commit: 3b4c963243b1 ("docs: conf.py: adjust the LaTeX document output")
The afore mentioned patch disables Sphinx default behavior of
using NON-BREAKABLE SPACE on literal blocks and strings, using this
special setting: "parsedliteralwraps=true".
When NON-BREAKABLE SPACE were used on PDF outputs, several parts of
the media uAPI docs were violating the document margins by far,
causing texts to be truncated.
So, please **don't add NON-BREAKABLE SPACE**, unless you test
(and keep testing it from time to time) if outputs on all
formats are properly supporting it on different Sphinx versions.
-
Also, most of those came from conversion tools, together with other
eccentricities, like the usage of U+FEFF (BOM) character at the
start of some documents. The remaining ones seem to came from
cut-and-paste.
For instance, bibliographic references (there are a couple of
those on media) sometimes have NON-BREAKABLE SPACE. I'm pretty
sure that those came from cut-and-pasting the document titles
from their names at the original PDF documents or web pages that
are referenced.
> > While it is perfectly fine to use UTF-8 characters in Linux, and specially at
> > the documentation, it is better to stick to the ASCII subset on such
> > particular case, due to a couple of reasons:
> >
> > 1. it makes life easier for tools like grep;
>
> Barely, as noted, because of things like line feeds.
You can use grep with "-z" to seek for multi-line strings(*), Like:
$ grep -Pzl 'grace period started,\s*then' $(find Documentation/ -type f)
Documentation/RCU/Design/Data-Structures/Data-Structures.rst
(*) Unfortunately, while "git grep" also has a "-z" flag, it
seems that this is (currently?) broken with regards of handling multilines:
$ git grep -Pzl 'grace period started,\s*then'
$
> > 2. they easier to edit with the some commonly used text/source
> > code editors.
>
> That is nonsense. Any but the most broken and/or anachronistic
> environments and editors will be just fine.
Not really.
I do use a lot of UTF-8 here, as I type texts in Portuguese, but I rely
on the US-intl keyboard settings, that allow me to type as "'a" for á.
However, there's no shortcut for non-Latin UTF-codes, as far as I know.
So, if would need to type a curly comma on the text editors I normally
use for development (vim, nano, kate), I would need to cut-and-paste
it from somewhere[1].
[1] If I have a table with UTF-8 codes handy, I could type the UTF-8
number manually... However, it seems that this is currently broken
at least on Fedora 33 (with Mate Desktop and US intl keyboard with
dead keys).
Here, <CTRL><SHIFT>U is not working. No idea why. I haven't
test it for *years*, as I din't see any reason why I would
need to type UTF-8 characters by numbers until we started
this thread.
In practice, on the very rare cases where I needed to write
non-Latin utf-8 chars (maybe once in a year or so, Like when I
would need to use a Greek letter or some weird symbol), there changes
are high that I wouldn't remember its UTF-8 code.
So, If I need to spend time to seek for an specific symbol, after
finding it, I just cut-and-paste it.
But even in the best case scenario where I know the UTF-8 and
<CTRL><SHIFT>U works, if I wanted to use, for instance, a curly
comma, the keystroke sequence would be:
<CTRL><SHIFT>U201csome string<CTRL><SHIFT>U201d
That's a lot harder than typing and has a higher chances of
mistakenly add a wrong symbol than just typing:
"some string"
Knowing that both will produce *exactly* the same output, why
should I bother doing it the hard way?
-
Now, I'm not arguing that you can't use whatever UTF-8 symbol you
want on your docs. I'm just saying that, now that the conversion
is over and a lot of documents ended getting some UTF-8 characters
by accident, it is time for a cleanup.
Thanks,
Mauro
