Hi Alex,
At 2023-07-17T22:36:28+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Please check if you like this ffix patch. Things I'm changing:
>
> - Use .RI instead of \f
>
> Uncontroversial.
Right.
> - \%
>
> I guess this one is uncontroversial to you. ;)
Also right. :D
> - \:
>
> To make the previous one not so horrible.
Agreed.
> - Reverse what is in italics and what is in roman.
>
> Path names should go in italics. This wasn't being done,
> which was a bug. Now, the variable part is in roman, to
> differentiate from the literal path name.
Also a good change.
> - \[dq]
>
> We need it 'cause of .RI.
I think you don't. \[dq] is only for "neutral" double quotes, as in
when you really mean U+0022 (in code examples, for instance), and you
don't mean that here.
I would either leave the file name unquoted, and trust the reader to
figure out that the period at the end of the sentence is not part of the
file name, or use real quotation marks.
> +.RI \%\[lq]$LD_PROFILE_OUTPUT /\: $LD_PROFILE .profile \[rq].
None of the special characters \(dq, \(aq, \(lq, \(rq, \(oq, and \(cq is
perfectly portable to historical *roffs. DWB 3.3 troff supported the
first two for some output devices but not others. Version 7 Unix troff
didn't support _any_ of them. ("ASCII ' and " ought to be enough
quotation marks for anybody," someone at Murray Hill must have said.)
The good news is that the Linux man-pages project likely does not need
to target historical *roff implementations. groff, mandoc, and Heirloom
Doctools troff support all of these special characters. (I didn't try
neatroff or Plan 9 from User Space troff, as they are harder to run in
my daily development environment.)
The only (arguably) live troff implementation I know of that is likely
to run into trouble with man pages using these special characters is
that of Solaris 10, which recently had its execution date postponed to
January 2025[1][2][3]. (Solaris 11 ships groff.) But how many people
are going to be viewing Linux man-pages documents on Solaris?
Also, it is easy to update any AT&T device-independent troff to support
all of these special characters. groff_font(5) describes how.
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/support/post/extended-support-for-oracle-solaris-10-operating-system
[2] The previous EOL date for Solaris 10 was early 2024, and I was
planning on dropping support for it in groff 1.24. I am as certain
as I can be that Oracle made this decision solely to spite me. :P
[3] And even if that troff, a descendant of AT&T troff, is technically
"live", I'd be surprised if it'd been changed in the past 10 years.
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