Hi, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:41:22AM -0400:
> to the more readable (and, I submit, more writable-by-the-novice): > > .TP > .B \-scale \c > .IR xfac [, yfac ] > Multiply the horizontal and vertical window size by YIKES, that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea! The \c escape sequence is a horrible hack that should never be used by end users and should be avoided, if possible, even in the implementation of macro sets. Did you read the description of \c on: https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Line-Control.html It is horribly complicated, referring to various purely internal concepts. Besides, i'm not at all convinced that this is even mildly portable. For example, the Heirloom nroff/troff User's Manual says that "the next encountered input text line will be considered to be a continuation of the same line of input text". So, the effect is only defined if both the interrupted line and the continuation line are *text lines*, and neither ".B ..." nor ".IR ..." qualify as text lines as far as i can tell: both are macro lines. Even the groff documentation talks about "the next input text line". It may happen to more or less work in some cases with the current groff implementation, but relying on that would seem unwise to me. Yours, Ingo P.S. There is little you can do to make writing legacy man(7) code easier for the novice. The problem is that it always requires mixing two different language levels: man(7) macros and low-level roff requests and escapes. And that it also requires writing physical rather than semantic markup, which is obviously harder to do in a consistent manner. Writing mdoc(7) is much easier for the novice because it's semantic and because it does not require mixing in low-level roff features. But trying to make man(7) easier to write is bound for disaster. The only remaining asset of man(7) is portability, and even that is becoming less and less of an argument for using it given the wide availablity of both mdoc(7) itself and the mandoc -Tman mdoc(7)-to-man(7) converter. If, by fiddling with man(7) syntax, you harm man(7) portability, then you really throw it's last remaining asset overboard.
