[CC list trimmed of Texinfo people/lists] At 2023-04-11T11:39:11+0200, Dirk Gouders wrote: [I wrote:] > > 4. A habit has grown up among man(1) programs and pagers to call > > for and support, respectively, a "blank line squeezing" feature: any > > runs of more than one blank line are condensed to 1 blank line each. > > In groff 1.23.0, this will no longer be necessary when continuously > > rendering. (Historically, this squeezing feature was used to > > "tighten up" vertical space after the page header, prior to the > > "NAME" section heading of the document.) In my opinion, pager > > programs should perform as few transformations as possible on the > > output of grotty(1), the groff output driver that supports terminal > > devices. The long-time author and maintainer of less(1) does not > > agree, so you have to call that program with its "-R" flag to view > > grotty(1) output as groff intends it. (To see what those intentions > > are, format the document without paging it.) > > Thank you for the detailled assessment. Perhaps my misunderstanding > is because I'm not a native speaker but which document should I format > to see what those intentions are? Just about any man page will do. By "intentions" I mean things like typeface changes and, in the forthcoming groff 1.23.0,[1] OSC 8 escape sequences to encode hyperlinks. For instance, if I want to look at groff_man(7)'s man page without the intermediation of man(1) or a pager, I can do this. $ man -w groff_man # to tell me where the document is installed /usr/share/man/man7/groff_man.7.gz $ zcat $(!!) | nroff -t -mandoc I recommend the above as an early troubleshooting step with rendering problems, though your terminal emulator may need a lot of scrollback buffer, depending on the document. (On rare occasions, a document may require a preprocessor other than tbl(1), but the parts that use them generally won't produce good (eqn) or any (pic) results on terminal devices. "-t -mandoc" should suffice for well over 95% of man pages.) > > Since I flogged groff 1.23.0 three times in this email, I suppose I > > should point people to where they can get the 1.23.0.rc3 release > > candidate source archive. Feedback would be appreciated. > > Oh well, I didn't measure it but I spent quite some time to work on > doc/lsp-help.1 and try to find a solution for that "nasty empty line" > that appeared in of the tables that I use for the online help -- I was > convinced it was my fault. I am sure a lot of people thought that. I was quite pleased to track down and stomp that bug. > Gentoo already has an ebuild for groff-1.23.0-rc3 and simply using > this fixes that problem in the table. So, from now on all my testing > happens with groff-1.23.0-rc3 and I will report should I recognize > problems. Please do. Bruno Haible has found a passel of portability problems to non-GNU/Linux systems, and helped us to resolve several of them; I am hopeful that 1.23.0 will be the most easily deployed groff in quite some time. Regards, Branden [1] We just tagged and put out 1.23.0.rc4 this past weekend. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-04/msg00135.html
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