Follow-up Comment #2, bug#65101 (group groff):
Why are you doing this? Should I expect mdoc to use four fonts and have all
the controls that make precise layouts possible stripped out because man
doesn't have them? I never should've bothered reporting this after that time I
posted about using Tn and you deleted it because you don't like it. But I'll
dig because this is just so insane to me. How are mdoc and man related here
and man relevant here _at all_? Why do you feel like you have the right to
take a document someone else wrote and alter it because you don't like how it
looks? It may not feel like that's what you're doing mechanically but you are
altering a 30-year-old body of work out of personal preference. Do you feel
you should be doing this and that this is a good thing to be doing? What in
_god's own name_ is "history of how man page topics got rendered over time"
doing in a response to "you made a macro that rendered in a specific
consistent way for 30 years render in a completely different way"? If you like
that way better, because this is all _your personal visual and editorial
preference_, then gate it all on \n[groff_new_mdoc] and let _individual
authors_ opt into it. You are not manufacturing a singular system here (you
can tell because you haven't written any new manuals or edited any existing
manuals to fit the new macro system), and your goal is not to make every page
somehow magically look identical (because you *didn't write those documents*;
this is also obviously impossible), you are providing an _interface_ for
others to write documents against, which has been consistent for 30 years,
with occasional bug fixes and extensions, sure, but not with _a fundamental
change of what output is generated_, and how it behaves. I would 100% opt into
a groff_new_mdoc "look" and write documents against it. If you market it as
The New Unified Common Free Way most authors probably would. I _will not_
tolerate, defined as "getting my knickers in a twist" 🤮, just flagrantly
changing my documents because you don't like them. I don't think you would
either! This is crazy to me because I thought if there's one API one could
count on being consistent to lay out documents with it'd be mdoc which has
been used to lay out documents for decades with a consistent look and feel and
a well-behaved and constant interface. _Groff itself_ has for a long time
defined a contract: hey Nm looks like this. Xr looks like this. Li looks like
this. Sx looks like this. Tn looks like this. The manual is perfectly clear on
what all the macros look like. And you decided to completely violate this.
They no longer look like what they have been documented to look like for
decades. This isn't cruft (like the Pq thin spaces were), this isn't something
to correct (like the Ss indent the section name goes multi-line), this is
deliberate design. I have personally spent days if not weeks (months,
actually, but most of that time was also spent producing the text itself, and
I also care about troff renders; this will just be days-to-weeks for most
people) making sure that out of four fonts available in nroff mode the body of
the text is clear and obvious. Shuffling the fonts around *100% breaks this*.
Again, if this were just a new mode? I'd opt in and write with it when it
reaches stability. If this new german psyche is rendered unto my documents by
force? I am violated.
Sorry, long post. If you don't care about reading my essay about colonialism
please just put the altered L&F behind .if dgroff_new_mdoc and unbreak the
last 30 years of documents. I'd define groff_new_mdoc in my new mdoc documents
:)
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