Hi Alex! At 2021-01-22T14:00:33+0100, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: > Why do some pages use \:/ for the slash in the path part of a URL, but > some others don't, and just use /? Laziness or ignorance of how URLs get typeset and what the \: escape is for. URLs are typeset with hyphenation disabled. That means that the line preceding a URL can be broken early in a very ugly way, somewhat like this sentence. Slashes in URLs turn out to be pretty good places to break a line if it must be. If you wanted a hyphen to appear at the break point, you'd use the "hyphenation character", an escape that goes way back to 1970s AT&T troff: \%. However, as with URLs,sometimes you want a hyphenless break point, and that's what groff's \: is. Heirloom Doctools troff supports \: as well. mandoc 1.14.1 does not (it refuses to break URLs at all, at least for man(7) documents; I didn't check its mdoc(7) support). > Moreover, why do the former use \:/ only for the path, but not for the > protocol? I think it is because people feel like postponing a break by 7 more characters to get the first part after the schema adjacent to it is not too high a price to pay. There's no deep reason why you couldn't do: .UR http\:://www\:.w3\:.org\:/CGI Common Gateway Interface .UE for instance. House style for the groff man pages is to place hyphenless break points _before_ periods and _after_ slashes in pathnames and URLs. The former point is one I'd recommend firmly to others, because it helps keep the reader from confusing a line-broken pathname or URL as ending a sentence (prematurely). The latter convention is more arbitrary; plenty of perfectly valid URLs (and pathnames) exist with or without trailing slashes, so one can't infer the end of such an object from the presence or absence of a slash at the end of a line of text. Regards, Branden
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