Lennart Jablonka <h...@ljabl.com> wrote: >>It would be very nice to add raw ASCII/UTF art to manpages. That would >>make manpages very expressive, as package maintainers will be able to >>add ASCII/UTF diagrams and/or art. Imagine your manpage showing you a >>colored text chart, logo, and what not. Groff would add \e[0m to >>beginning and end of every line, so the styles defined in such raw >>input have no interference with surrounding manpage text. This feature >>is similar to adding jpeg images to html pages that previously just >>displayed text. Perhaps the only requirement from the user would be >>that such image fits in a nice rectangular shape, the character height >>and width of which is perhaps provided by them.
> I disagree, but apart from that, there’s nothing stopping > you from doing just that today with your man pages. Get > your fixed-width type face with .EX or whatever and play > with groff’s color stuff. grotty is capable of emitting SGR > escape sequences for colors. > I also want to point at pic, which allows you to draw > diagrams if your device supports line drawing stuff, and at > the primitive line drawing capability of grotty. BTW, something I always found interesting in that area was the other way around: Prettifying ASCII "art" when output to non-TTY devices. Take for example this paragraph from git-rebase(1): | Assume the following history exists and the current | branch is "topic": | A---B---C topic | / | D---E---F---G master When outputting this with "man -t", it just gets printed as is (even in a proportional font). It would be much more vi- sually pleasing if this was instead printed as a pic diagram with circles and lines. It should be possible to produce different output depending on the n or t condition. Tim
