[[ Title trimmed; I couldn't read the contents on Thunderbird ]]
Hi Michael,
On 11/15/20 11:32 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
> On 11/15/20 3:07 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> Reported-by: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@xxxxxxxxx>
>> Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> As we discussed,
>> I removed _every_ appearance of [.nf] and [.fi] from the pages.
>
> Ooops -- I don't quite recall the details of that discussion.
> But, this is not so simple.
Actually, Branden and I discussed that a few days ago,
and IIRC we (Branden, you, and I) mentioned it a long time ago.
>
>> There were some unmatched [.nf] appearances,
>> which I manually matched with [.EE].
>
> In cases like this, it would probably be better to split this
> out into separate patches with a small preparatory patch that
> fixes the unbalanced .nf macros, followed by the bigger patch,
> but even so, it's not so simple...
Yes, I should've done that...
I'll fix those separately.
Actually one of those was my fault (tailq.3).
>
> .nf/.fi appears in two places generally:
> (1) Inside the SYNOPSIS (many pages)
> (2) Elsewhere in the page (fewer pages)
>
> Probably, most (all?) cases in the second category should
> really be .EX/.EE.
>
> But in the SYNOPSIS, .nf/.fi is used inconsistently. The
> majority of pages use it, but a substantial minority (200+ pages)
> do not (e.g., chdir.2). (That inconsistency is a mess from
> history.) Why does this matter? Well, theoretically at least,
> pages might be rendered to something other than the terminal.
> I care at least a little bit about PDF rendering[1], and the
> inconsistency means that converting .nf/fi to .EX/.EE will
> produce a very different appearance in pages that currently
> do/don't use .nf/.fi in the SYNOPSIS.
>
> What to do? I'm not sure. When I look at the PDF renderings,
> using simply .nf/.fi (or nothing at all) in the SYNOPSIS
> produces a variable-width-font output that is visually
> appealing for the function prototypes. Switching to
> .EX/.EE, the result is not unpleasant, but I'm not
> sure I prefer it (in a PDF rendering).[2]
>
> As a first step, all pages should probably be using .nf/.fi
> in the SYNOPSIS. But, that's probably a painful manual edit.
> I've been manually fixing pages over the years, but many
> are not fixed yet.
Hmm, didn't think about those.
I agree that it may be nicer with .nf/.fi for the SYNOPSIS
from what you say
(I'll try it myself).
I'll see if I can come up with a script that
keeps .nf/.fi in the SYNOPSIS
and changes everything else.
For the rest, you would change to .EX/.EE, right?
>
>> That's the reason there are a few more insertions than deletions.
>
>
> I manually fixed chroot.2, memfd_create.2, and tailq.3. Were there
> any others?
No... probably.
I checked that the number of .nf+.fi was even for a single file,
and that the total number of .nf equaled
the total number of .fi in a directory
(it was too much work to check every file).
>
>> Woah, 439 KiB of a patch...
>
> :-)
>
>
>> I tested a few of the pages to see
>> if anything changed in the rendered output.
>> Apparently, no.
>> I hope that holds throughout all of the modified pages.
>>
>> BTW, I had to script a bit to get the subject of the commit
>> (as you can probably guess I didn't write that myself :p)
>> Would you want to add that to 'scripts/'?
>
> I myself have a small script based around the output of
>
> git status | grep 'modified:' | awk '{print $NF}'
>
> How do you do it?
I just sent a patch before reading this email.
Mine is a bit more reliable I think,
but maybe you can still improve it :)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Michael
>
> [1]
> function pdfmanq {
> man -Tps -l $1 > /tmp/$(basename $1).$$.ps
> ps2pdf /tmp/$(basename $1).$$.ps $1.pdf
> }
>
> function pdfman {
> pdfmanq $1
> evince $1.pdf # Or whatever PDF viewer you use
> }
>
> # pdfman somepage.n
Thanks!
>
> [2]
> But I am perhaps old school on this point.
>
I tend to be so too, even though I'm 27 :p
Cheers,
Alex
