> > I tend to advocate the use of .DS/.DE, .TQ, .EX/.EE, .SY, .OP, and > > probably other nifty things to be used within man pages, > > *together* with its macro definitions in the preamble. This gives > > us both a decent markup and backwards compatibility. > > This is certainly an acceptable path, provided that the new macros > are offered in a public domain implementation so that everybody can > use them without worrying about the license.
Of course. > Still, if you want macros for the synopsis, there is something > missing yet. Code like > > | .OP \-W name > | .RI "[\ " files\|.\|.\|. "\ ]" > > mixes structural and visual markup in a questionable way (the > second line makes assumptions about how the output of .OP looks). I'm open to any suggestions for a sensible macro. > POSIX (available for free from <http://www.unix.org>) has a set of > prescriptions for synopsis formatting within the standard (Base > Definitions, 12.1 "Utility Argument Syntax"). It clearly has its > origins in manual page synopsis practice, so looking at it might be > helpful for defining synopsis macros. Thanks for the pointer. Here a direct URL: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html However, those rules are not really helpful IMHO in our discussion how such macros should look like. Werner _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
