On 2023-07-17 23:09, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> 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.
Ahh, right. I always keep forgetting that. I guess since I fixed the
italics, I can just remove the quotes.
Thnaks!
>
>> +.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
Heh, we'll have to live with Paul Eggert's weird pages for a few more
years.
Cheers,
Alex
>
> [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.
--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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