Follow-up Comment #8, bug #55278 (group groff):
commit c105b1725cc928e225d23237f3cf1a7a5239d5ba
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu Jun 27 22:14:50 2019 +1000
grotty.1.man: Make editorial fixes.
* Add "terminal" keyword to summary line.
* Reorganize synopsis.
+ Distinguish modes of operation.
- Only SGR mode (the default) accepts -i or -r.
- Only legacy mode accepts -[bBuU].
- Note --help and --version modes.
* Recast introductory paragraph; because groff does its own pipeline
management, people tend to think of "the output of *roff" not as the
device-independent form but of device-specific output (PDF, TTY, ...).
* Add man page cross-references, particularly to groff(1) itself.
* Hyphenate attributive phrases (e.g., "EBCDIC-based hosts").
* Note the historically-driven practice of rendering (and speaking of)
underlined text as "italics" in nroff/TTY contexts.
+ Also call out the relatively new grotty -i option which gives you
something closer to true italics on xterm(1).
* Set pathnames/filenames in italics, not bold.
* Remove false claim about the default color scheme for terminals being
black text on a white background "in most cases".
+ I don't know who wrote that, but I suspect a Macintosh or Sun
workstation partisan. Whoever they were, they ignored a huge number
of monochrome hardware terminals by that were manufactured after
1980 (when green and amber phosphors grew popular) and by about 1987
the DEC VT340 was supporting color escapes (the VT420 and VT520
reverted to monochrome, and the VT525 (~1993) brought color back
again). The rise of the IBM 5150 ("PC") -compatible microcomputer
and the default white-on-black color scheme of MS-DOS/PC-DOS
contributed to user expectations of similar terminal color schemes
by 1990. By the mid-1990s when people started to hear of the Linux
kernel, official maintenance of the X Window System by the Open
Group was moribund, and the xterm client in the sample
implementation was _still_ monochrome as late as X11R6.5.1 (August
2000), but the Linux console (white-on-black, on PC VGA hardware)
wasn't, and a thousand clueless flowers bloomed across the land as
system integrators rushed to bring refugees from Microsoft Windows
the joy of colorized GNU ls(1) output in a GUI terminal window. For
the sake of "brand differentiation", these vendors chose "attractive
color schemes" for "the desktop", and imposed this scheme on the
terminal emulator without regard for the color palette, often
resulting in unreadable foreground colors against the "pleasant"
default background. But venture capitalists and IPO-hungry day
traders cared little for usability issues, being concerned more with
who was going to do the biggest cannonball into the swimming pool.
Had they bothered to look, they'd have noticed the similarity
between these initiatives and the ill-fated COSE/CDE at the tail end
of the Unix Wars only a few years previous. Upon these
lavishly-funded but dubiously-engineered foundations the dot-com
bubble burst, and billions of dollars of notional wealth disappeared
overnight. After that we had terrorist attacks and wars in the
Middle East, and it's all thanks to people who don't support their
claims about what "most" terminals use as a default color scheme.
* Structure a somewhat miscellaneous compendium of information into
subsections:
+ SGR support in pagers
+ Legacy output format
+ Device control commands
+ Device description files
* Comment out paragraph that I think might better belong elsewhere.
Feedback welcome.
* Add internal cross-references.
* Carefully distinguish *roff escape sequences from SGR escape sequences
in narrative. There's no escaping the terminology, so be clear about
context in each case.
* Note that horizontal and vertical lines are drawn with Unicode
box-drawing characters on the utf8 device.
* Don't set a metasyntactical ellipsis in bold. It's not a literal.
* Document supported long options.
* Don't talk about an option being "active"; talk about whether it's
specified--that's what the user has control over.
* Quote output device names instead of shouting them in bold (except
when part of option syntax).
* Comment out claim that cp1047 device files are only shipped on EBCDIC
platforms. The build no longer seems to practice this restriction?
* Style: ensure two empty requests between paragraphs.
commit 69c400e082f2b11c8b79a4a6224f174ee8a28d53
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri Jun 12 18:27:39 2020 +1000
Update descriptions of groff -a and grotty -c.
* doc/groff.texi (Groff Options): Remove editorial comment about '-a'
option being "useless". It isn't. Update example for contemporary
systems (like Debian) and to reflect the fact that the GNU troff(1)
man page needs to be preprocessed with tbl(1).
(Invoking grotty): Recast discussion of -c option, importing much
language from grotty(1) page rewrite from a year ago. Add program
index entries for col, more, and ul. Fix transposition error in ISO
document number.
* src/devices/grotty/grotty.1.man (Description/Legacy output format):
Make slight wording changes prompted by content of parallel section in
Texinfo manual.
* src/roff/groff/groff.1.man (Options/-a): Parallelize with first
sentence of corresponding material in Texinfo manual.
* src/roff/troff/troff.1.man (Options/-a): Parallelize with Texinfo
manual.
Fixes the rest of <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55278>.
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