Hi Alex, At 2023-01-22T22:11:06+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On 1/22/23 22:02, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > I would use \fP instead of \fR, this way you return to the > > "previous" > > Ahh, yes, thanks for catching that! Sleeping 3 hours is definitely > not good for the brain :P Certainly not. Good self-care keeps the engineer's brain supple. :) > > But I would also quote multi-word arguments to _any_ man(7) macro. > > Why is it? I remember you mentioned that, but what's the win? It's more portable. AT&T troff and its descendants (except for Heirloom Doctools troff) support only 9 macro arguments at most. Worse, the AT&T man(7) macros and most descendants support only _six_. When doing maintenance, it's easy to forget that. But even in a groff-only world, I would recommend the practice as good style because it leaves room to expand the syntax of some macros. Admittedly I don't see any promising places where we might do that in man(7) to any macros that already accept formattable text as arguments. I still think it's a good idea style-wise because the man(7) author should keep the count of words following a macro call in mind, especially if they want to effectively use the font style alternation macros (.BI, .BR, .IB, .IR, .RB, .RI). In mdoc(7) argument count makes a difference due to the package's unique recursive argument interpretation feature. Still, while this was a measurable phenomenon 30 years ago, it may not be today. (The whole reason "cat pages" exist in man(1) is that the time spent by the formatter on a document was significant then; it is negligible now.) I will admit right now that I don't follow this rule rigidly myself in groff's man pages when it comes to `I` calls. I may fix that at some point. (If I did so, it would align doc/ms.ms better with groff_ms(7).) So it's not a big deal, but there's so much ignorance about man(7) out there that it's a goal of mine to make the language easier to acquire. > > > +.SS "The \f[I]/proc/sys/user\f[] directory" > > Interesting. I'll consider that for the long term. However, for now > I'll keep \fP style. No worries. Regards, Branden
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