[CC list brutally trimmed] At 2021-07-31T13:02:27+0200, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: > I think you misunderstood the context here. > > I meant all of that about input, i.e., the text of the patch itself, > text to be added to a man page source text. > > What I meant is that when you break lines semantically (when writing a > patch), and initially forget about the 80 (or 75) column right margin, > most of the lines you write will already (as a side effect of breaking > lines semantically) be within the 80 (or 75) right margin. > > For those that still don't fit into 80 characters after doing that, > break further (or at some other point that may also break nicely > semantically); otherwise, I won't see the text when editing the man > page on my 80-col terminal. > > For those that still don't fit into 75 characters after doing that, > consider breaking further, but only if doing so seems easy and lines > break nicely. I can still see after line 75, and I can do some effort > to scroll an email a few columns if needed (when many quotes move the > text further to the right). So if the source code would break in a > weird way because of forcing a 75 col right margin, please ignore that > margin. > > I hope I was clear this time. Quite so. In my experience with the groff man pages (~60 of them), when you apply the semantic newline rule to commas, colons, and semicolons as well as sentence-ending punctuation, text lines that exceed 72 columns are fairly rare. (I also set multi-word parentheticals on their own input lines.) As I've noted elsewhere (in the "intro" PDF I shared the other day, though I don't think the document made it to the linux-man@ list--filtered, I suspect), if you find yourself crashing past 72 columns when using semantic newlines with ordinary prose, there's a good chance you need to recast for readability. From what I've seen, the hardest line length problems the Linux man-pages project deals with are in non-prose contexts; function synopses and similar. > BTW, thanks for your mail. It wasn't related to what I meant, but was > interesting :=) Thank you. That mitigates my chagrin at talking past the point. :) Regards, Branden
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