Re: man(7), hyphen, and minus

[Russ Allbery]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

> Right.  Four or five years ago I proposed a new groff special character
> identifier `\(hm` to cover this case.  But this was not met with assent,
> and I concede that the problem may be confined to man pages.

I've been curious: how much use do you see of groff outside of man pages?
I dropped a bunch of troff formating guesswork and magic from Pod::Man
that had caused no ends of maintenance problems because I have seen little
evidence of anyone using it for something other than man pages, and in my
day job supporting research science I don't hear anyone talking about roff
in that context either.  (Everyting is LaTeX.)

I've therefore started optimizing Pod::Man for manual pages, although if
anyone reports problems with any other use I try to keep it working.

As a related question, are there grand plans for adding more Unicode
support?  I noticed that, for example, troff from groff as installed on
Debian appeared to have fairly rudimentary Unicode font support.  It
looked like the default font was missing a bunch of characters, it didn't
handle combining accent marks when I tried, etc.  It's possible that I was
testing incorrectly, though.

> I also see the wisdom in Werner Lemberg's decision years ago to close
> groff's predefined special character identifier name space to any
> expansion without damn good reason.

Yeah, at this point I would recommend everyone switch to Unicode and try
to support it as well as possible, although that doesn't help with cases
where the debate is over how to render pre-existing ASCII characters.

> The EOLing of Solaris troff is fat with the promise of opportunity.
> It's my hope that Illumos won't need much of a nudge to jump to groff,
> Heirloom Doctools, or neatroff, any of which would be an improvement
> because they're _maintained_.

> (Well, Heirloom has slowed _way_ down...[2])

I had not heard of Heirloom Doctools or neatroff before, although I don't
follow this field very closely.  Do you know if any platform uses them for
man pages right now?  The two implementations I mostly target are groff
and mandoc, since that seems to cover the vast majority of modern systems
and the remainders are using some legacy UNIX code base that basicallly
doesn't exist outside of that UNIX.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>