Hi Ingo, While poking my nose around the Web to observe groff 1.23.0 uptake, I noticed OpenBSD's patch to groff's troffrc file.
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/textproc/groff/patches/patch-tmac_troffrc?rev=1.6&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup The following change concerns me: +.\" Disable adjustment by default, +.\" such that manuals look similar with groff and mandoc(1). +.ad l +.de ad +.. This is pretty extreme overkill for trying to get rendering parity between mandoc(1) and groff on OpenBSD. Namely, you're (A) hitting _every_ document and _every_ macro package with an altered default, not just man pages, and (B) you're clobbering the formatter's `ad` request so that _there is no way for any document using any macro package to recover this feature_. This cripples groff for non-man page applications that you don't mean for mandoc(1) to support. I believe I have heard you say before that you don't want to mess with patching (or maybe even shipping) groff's man.local or mdoc.local files to fine-tune its behavior. If that is correct then I recommend the following patch instead. .do if !d AD .ds AD l (Why "do"? troffrc in groff 1.23.0 is much more careful about trying to ensure that it works even if the user turns AT&T compatibility mode on at the command line.) This employs the new groff 1.23.0 `AD` string supported by groff's man(7) and mdoc(7). But it does so only if the user has not already set that string on the [gnt]roff command line. Because this does not destroy the `ad` request, it will be possible for man pages to resurrect adjustment, and some do. In particular, I have in mind a relentlessly applied pattern in the Linux man-pages, where tbl(7) tables are bracketed more or less as follows. .ad l .hy 0 .TS .\" whatever .TE .hy .ad Not only is this bad practice, it is pointless for tables that don't use text blocks (so is over-applied) and doesn't fully work as intended anyway. `hy` without an argument sets the automatic hyphenation mode to `1`, not "the previous value", in the spirit of exuberant non-orthogonality that animated early Bell Labs *roff development. (I'm working on a sed-driven fix for Linux man-pages.) (What if a table _does_ have text blocks? groff tbl(1): Text blocks are formatted as was the text prior to the table, modified by applicable column descriptors. Specifically, the classifiers A, C, L, N, R, and S determine a text block’s alignment within its cell, but not its adjustment. Add na or ad requests to the beginning of a text block to alter its adjustment distinctly from other text in the document. As with other table entries, when a text block ends, any alterations to formatting parameters are discarded. They do not affect subsequent table entries, not even other text blocks. ) I think it is better to expose the errors of man pages using bad practices (and/or poor portability to mandoc(1)) than to neuter a fundamental feature of text formatting for all groff users on OpenBSD who have gone to trouble to locate the port and install it. What do you think? Regards, Branden
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