El Miércoles, 31 de Agosto de 2005 01:02, Nicolas François escribió: > Hello, > > Many X man3 manpages uses the 'ds' groff macro to define a string and use > it later. Unfortunately (probably with the time), some of these strings do > not fit in one line, and thus this string is truncated, and the other piece > of string is displayed at the wrong place. > > Before submitting a bug report, I'm willing to know which king of patch > will have more chance to be applied: > * adding an input line continuation character (\ at the end of the line) > * removing those .ds, which are pure evil IMHO (these strings are most > of the time used once, this makes the man more complex, and - this > mail prove it - less maintainable [1]). > Notes: > + some of the .ds could be kept, like those of the header: > .ds xL Xlib \- C Language X Interface > + Maybe there is a use for these string variables, but I could no > find any.
Mmmm...I fixed several of these manpages in the last release, and I was
sure
that there were a lot more. Alan Coopersmith said so, several years ago some
"cosmetic" change broke in multiline the macros with the current result.
There is a message from Alan in bug #4112
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4112), that points to another
bunch of fixes in #2331. Summarizing, he fixed the problem by appending \ to
the end of multiline macros.
I will be happy to accept either patches that remove .ds or append \ to
affected lines (and submit upstream, of course). I understand that the latter
is likely the less intrusive way of doing, but I let it to your election.
Please, send us a message if you are going to work on this.
Thank you in advance,
Ender.
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