Re: man(7), hyphen, and minus

[Oliver Corff]

Hi All,

On 23/12/2022 21:49, Russ Allbery wrote:

> I've been curious: how much use do you see of groff outside of man pages?

Well, I've never written a single man page with the man macro set. I
have to confess, though, that during the early 1990s I wrote software
for MSDOS (that was the only platform _accessible_ to me), but I spent a
great effort to make my software behave like Unix software (one tool,
one purpose, piping from stdin to stdout, etc.) and format the
documentation of my software toolchain as a lookalike of man pages, with
all typical section names, indentation, etc. It was a lofty ideal of
software and documentation which I had been exposed to for the first
time, after having been confined to CPM machines for the early
"socialization" of my computer life: half a meter of ring binders
documenting the Unix system I was allowed to admire (and browse, though
not much more, unfortunately) in a colleague's office.

On the other hand, I (re-)discovered the beauty of the *roff approach to
typesetting only after a thorough exposure to TeX and (Xe)LaTeX. While
XeLaTeX has been essential for some of my publications, I have processed
at least 9,000 to 10,000 (if not more) pages of non-computer science
prose text, mainly using the ms macro set (wondering which macro set was
right for me, the ms macros produced, out of the box, the layout I had
envisaged). The visual appearance of the texts produced with ms comes
very close to the visual appearance of the historical sources I work
with, which makes it easy and pleasing to the eye browsing old and new
texts next to each other. There are strong indicators that many of the
source texts I use were typeset with ms or a variation thereof, but I
have no conclusive evidence.

> 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.

What is on *my* wish list? Yes, Unicode support for Asian characters!
I'd be totally happy if I could easily include a Chinese or Japanese
book title or a word in western text; I could do without sophisticated
paragraph layout (Werner knows best where the pitfalls are). If this
rudimentary support were there, I'd produce some of my publications
definitely with groff, not necessarily with LaTex.

And my final wish: a %u or %U tag for reference files (URL) in ms which
currently is a stand-alone feature of mom.

I *do* remember that I promised, a good while ago, to write an
introduction to tbl with some real-world showcase examples of the more
elaborated kind; not forgotten, just postponed again and again due to a
series of unpredictable impacts on my daily routine.

Best wishes for Christmas and New Year,

Oliver.

PS: I enjoy being on this list. Your [plural] caring attention to
minutiae in dealing with source code, old versions, and the whole
historical background of *roff while reworking and developing the
current versions is a fine example in the best tradition of philological
scholarship --- thus is the appeal to a philologist! Thank you all for
your attitude which makes it such a reassuring pleasure to work with groff.



> > 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.
--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
G E R M A N Y
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
Mail: oliver.corff@email.de