[replying just to Alex and the lists] Hi Alex, At 2022-07-30T01:01:09+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > Format structures with tbl(1) to improve alignment in > proportional-width font text. > > I also reordered the types in the SYNOPSIS, to be consistent with > C syntax. > > Reported-by: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@xxxxxxxxx> > Cc: Heinz-Jürgen Oertel <hj.oertel@xxxxxxxxxxx> > Cc: Ralph Corderoy <ralph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> > --- > > This page clearly shows that using tabs would be hard. > > Although having different alignment for every structure doesn't > convince me... You can resolve that. Simply choose column widths that are large enough for the widest data types and identifiers appearing in the page, and use the `w` modifier in each table to impose that width on the relevant columns. At a glace, these look like plausible candidates. > -.BR " struct in6_addr sin6_addr;" " /* IPv6 address */" > -.BR " uint32_t sin6_scope_id;" " /* Set of interfaces for a scope */" "struct in6_addr" is 15 characters wide; in typographer-speak, call that 15 ens, and in roff(7) lands "15n". "sin6_scope_id" is 13n. So your table formats for this page would look like this. lBW(15n)2 lBW(13n)2 l1 lX. These explicit measurements are not guaranteed to be perfect; they may leave excess space or even be too small in the unlikely event you have to deal with data types or identifiers that look like "MWMWMWMWMWM". On the bright side I can't think of how they could go wrong in terminals. And you can, of course, spend as much time time as you care to tuning them for typesetting devices. But these widths will have to be manually maintained, and in multiple places at that. (Of course, this only applies if a page documents more than one struct or union type _and_ uses more than one table _and_ you want the columns to align across those tables.) Like I said on the groff list, tbl(1) is heavy machinery. And beautiful typography spreads its sublime wings when proportional typefaces get involved. There are good roffish tricks for avoiding some of these problems--they involve using the `\w` escape sequence to measure things, and storing the results in registers--but unfortunately they are unlikely to work well, or at all, with mandoc(1) or other non-roff formatters. But, people thought they weren't giving up anything important when, 20 years ago, they decided they wanted to wanted to parse man pages into XML or HTML without having to implement a roff formatter. man(7) pages were "almost" simple enough... So if you want me to resurrect that tab stop-computing macro idea, let me know. ;-) Regards, Branden
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