Hi Branden, Thanks :) I'll use 78 from now on, then. Cheers, Alex On 12/20/20 9:57 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Hi Alex, > > At 2020-12-12T19:01:30+0100, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: >> On 12/11/20 10:26 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >>> Hi Alex, >>> >>> On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 22:14, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) >>> <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi Michael, >>>> >>>> For code, for example function prototypes in SYNOPSIS, do you have a >>>> preferred right margin? 80? 72? >>> >>> If I understand your question, 80. But what prompts you to ask? > > I researched the question of right margin/line length for a change I > made to groff earlier this year, and my findings were that you should > format man pages for 78 columns; this will probably work practically > everywhere. Things other than tbl(1) tables will work okay at widths > even narrow than this. > > Why 78 and not 80? I couldn't find an authoritative answer, but my > guess is that 80 was viewed as too risky for terminals that would > misbehave with respect to wrapping or scrolling when a write was done to > the last cell on the line or screen. That gets us down to 79, and > perhaps a preference for even numbers over odd ones explains 78. > > Quoting my own research: > > "...man-db man(1) has supported the LL register for eighteen years, and > Brouwer/Lucifredi man(1) for fifteen. Heirloom Doctools's man macros > set the line length to 78n on nroff devices unconditionally. mandoc(1) > similarly also always formats for 78 columns on terminals. groff's > mdoc(7) macros grew support for LL in parallel with man(7) in 2002 and > never added the \n[.l] introspection at all."[1] > > Regards, > Branden > > [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=7770e10fa4d5b903b6923f466154c806c44de35a > -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
