On 09/08/2023 11:16, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > Hi Jinny, > > On 2023-08-07 17:36, Jonny Grant wrote: >>>> >>>> Noticed that sometimes the '⟨' doesn't render, perhaps it is not in all fonts, would it be possible to use consider using regular '<' and '>' character in the man page? >>> >>> That is implemented using man(7)'s UR, which is for URIs. The source >>> code of the manual page doesn't know about the glyph that will be >>> produced in your system. In your system, groff(1) will try to find >>> the most appropriate one. You (or your distributor) can also tweak >>> that. You can for example change it to use ASCII '<' and '>'. >>> >>> In man7.org, I guess that you read it correctly from any machine. >>> In your systems' pages there's no COLOPHON anymore (I removed it >>> in man-pages-6.01). If you're on an old system, you can tweak it. >>> >>> But you'll still see that character in pages that have URIs in them. >>> For example, let's consider hier(7): >>> >>> $ grep -n '^\.UR ' man7/hier.7; >>> 640:.UR https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml >>> >>> which renders as (including the whole section): >>> >>> STANDARDS >>> The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), Version 3.0 >>> ⟨https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml⟩;, published >>> March 19, 2015 >> >> >> Fair enough. Some pages even have both. > > Pages that use both are bad. That means that in some places they used > the correct UR man(7) macro, and in some others they hardcoded <>, which > is wrong. It may happen in <man7.org>, because the COLOPHON was added > by Michael, while the page was written by a different author. In other > places, it means that the page is badly written. > > I know of uri.7, where this happens, and some day I'll fix it. > >> I saw sometime <> is used, as I expected, > > Those pages are wrongly written. I expect that most of those pages are > not written in man(7), but rather translated from some other source > language by a program, which usually produce crap man(7) source. > >> other times '⟨⟩' . > > When you see that, the page was written properly in man(7) (or > mdoc(7)? I expect both produce the same glyph; Branden?). > >> "SEE ALSO" >> >> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cp.1.html > > I think GNU coreutils is one of those projects that don't write man(7) > source, but rather translate it from a different language. > > alx@debian:~/src/gnu/coreutils$ find | grep 'cp\.1' > alx@debian:~/src/gnu/coreutils$ > >> >> But though "COLOPHON" looks like it was appended by a man7 website script with the '⟨⟩' instead, > > Yes, Michael uses a script to generate the COLOPHON. That script uses > the proper method for writing URIs: the UR man(7) macro. He used a > similar script for releasing man-pages until 5.13, as you'll find our > pages in versions <=5.13 had a COLOPHON in them. > > I temporarily added a script that did the same thing: > > <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/scripts/append_COLOPHON.sh?h=cd34c839d3c9878db9105714b1e460f30057e7f2> > > You can expect that Michael's script will be similar. > > However, shortly after I decided to just remove the COLOPHON section, > and thus the script: > > <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?h=8c3052b0322580eba62de91f04ba657f7dfe360e> > >> so I thought maybe that could be changed for consistency to <>. > > No. It should be <> that are fixed to use the UR man(7) macro.> >> There are so many different characters that could be used, but <> is on every keyboard :) > > But nobody types ⟨⟩. It's generated by groff(1). When you write > an email or anything similar, you can use <>, but for manual pages, > those symbols are fine, I guess. > Ok I agree. If UR was used consistently it would be better. Thank you for your reply. I'd change the groff configuration to generate the web version of those UR on man7.org to be <>. Maybe that's just my preference :) Kind regards, Jonny
