Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes: > Jean-Michel Vourgère <[email protected]> writes:
>> I'm using pod to generate man files in package rrdtool. >> I had an issue with long man lines such as: >> B<DEF:>I<E<lt>vnameE<gt>>=I<E<lt>rrdfileE<gt>>:I<E<lt>ds-nameE<gt>>:I<E<lt>CFE<gt>>[:step=I<E<lt>stepE<gt>>][:start=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>][:end=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>][:reduce=I<E<lt>B<CF>E<gt>>][:daemon=I<E<lt>addressE<gt>>] >> that results lintian "manpage-has-errors-from-man": can't break line. >> That I fixed that by inserting unicode zero-width-space characters 200B: >> B<DEF:>I<E<lt>vnameE<gt>>=I<E<lt>rrdfileE<gt>>:I<E<lt>ds-nameE<gt>>:I<E<lt>CFE<gt>>[:step=I<E<lt>stepE<gt>>][:start=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:end=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:reduce=I<E<lt>B<CF>E<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:daemon=I<E<lt>addressE<gt>>] >> I expected pod2man to generate the corect \: escape sequence, but it >> did not. [...] > Unfortunately, \: appears to be a groff extension as far as I can tell. > It's at least not mentioned in CSTR 54, nor in other older documentation > I can find for the *roff language. That means this gets entangled in > the general design constraint that pod2man tries to produce portable > *roff output that's not specific to groff. > I'm not certain this is fully correct because unfortunately it's very > difficult to search for \: to get more data. Many years later, I have incorporated this change in podlators 5.00, just now released. It will still be a bit before that's incorporated into Perl and thus into the Debian Perl packages, but I wanted to let you know that this fix is properly in progress. I went ahead and did the conversion to \: unconditionally since it's documented in the mandoc roff reference as well as groff. That covers nearly all modern platforms. It may still not work on a few older nroff implementations like Solaris or AIX, but this case is obscure enough and enough other things related to Unicode don't work there anyway that I don't think it should cause any serious problems. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
