Hi Doug, At 2022-09-06T17:06:14-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote: [I wrote:] > > A man page author at anything less than master level might wonder, > > when composing and test-rendering a section 7 page, why they have to > > supply text in this case but not any other > > I apparently weigh in far below master level.
I wouldn't say _that_... > I didn't realize there was a default per section. There wasn't in 7th edition tmac.an, while there were defaults for other things. > But seeing them laid out, I observe that the word "Manual" is > redundant in all of them. That's a fair point. > The word seems to have been expunged (or never introduced) in Linux. I can't speak for other projects, but groff's man(7) implementation has had substantially these strings, with the terminal word "Manual", since 2011. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=53f513850a96953bc545fe1f37a33257fb48731d Apparently, the defaults were modeled on mdoc(7). commit 53f513850a96953bc545fe1f37a33257fb48731d Author: Werner LEMBERG <w...@gnu.org> Date: Thu Dec 1 07:58:37 2011 +0000 [man] Print volume headers like mdoc. * tmac/an-old.tmac (an-init): Add default volume name if fifth argument to `.TH' is missing. > Incidentally, "Miscellaneous Information" says in 9 syllables what > "Miscellany" says in 4. Another fair point. It also would help to teach people that the term "miscellaneous" has a noun decelension. I'm open to revising these post-groff-1.23. Regards, Branden
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