[CC += Ingo] Hi Branden, On Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 06:45:31PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/an.tmac?h=1.23.0#n162 Hmmm. What would be affected by changing that default? Does it affect anything other than a literal tab in source code? I presume it doesn't affect .IP or .RS, and it shouldn't affect tbl(7), so it would be quite harmless to define that to a different value. Considering that the BSDs are 8-col tabs people too, I suspect Ingo won't be too much attached to that default. Especially, since few people already use tabs in their manual pages. And even if the default doesn't change, I can just point to people to the reason why they see 5-col indents in their manuals, so they can tweak it if they are too irritated by it (most likely to poke their packager to tweak it for them). > > Why am I not seeing 8-char indents? > > Because the package redefines the tab stops. > > This rears the head of the portability beast a bit higher. > > Famous Original Doug's man(7) in Seventh Edition Unix also set the tab > stops at every half-inch. > > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an > > So does Heirloom Doctools. So does mandoc(1). Hmmm. > Neatroff doesn't ship its own man(7) implementation, and Plan 9 and > Solaris 10 troffs, and whatever other System V troffs still exist, > I'll wager have no relevance to the Linux man-pages project. No, they don't have much. > This half-inch tab stop default would seem to foreclose the possibility > of using hard tabs for code examples in your man page sources, unless > you want to depart from Ingo's and my man(7) portability advice > regarding the use of formatter requests. Well, I'm not too uncomfortable indenting by 5 spaces, if that's the default. Then it's up to each one to reconsider the defaults. :-) Have a lovely day! Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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