an.tmac, .TH: shows the same text twice in the header! Why necessary?
Example from "sensible-terminal(1)": .\" -*- nroff -*- .TH SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR 1 "28 Aug 2022" "Debian" .SH NAME sensible-terminal-emulator \- sensible terminal emulator -.-. With "/usr/bin/man --version": man 2.11.2 Output from "env MANWIDTH=80 /usr/bin/man -l example": grotty::():9: warning: unrecognized X command 'sgr 0' ignored SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR(1General Commands ManuSENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR(1) NAME sensible-terminal-emulator - sensible terminal emulator Debian28 Aug 2022SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR(1) -.-. The text "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" is output twice in the header, is once not enough and why? (Is this necessary(?))
Re: an.tmac, .TH: shows the same text twice in the header! Why necessary?
On 7/22/23, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > The text "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" is output twice in the header, You've been seeing this for decades and have never noticed it, because most Unix commands are short and the repetition is unobtrusive. Try "man ls", "man grep", "man ssh", "man ascii", "man troff", or any other common command. Each man page name gets placed on the top left and top right of the page. I agree, for a galumphing command name like "sensible-terminal-emulator" the repetition is not only overkill but detrimental, as it overwrites other header fields. > is once not enough and why? (Is this necessary(?)) I don't know why other than extremely longstanding tradition. (Man pages have been formatted like this for at least 30 years on many flavors of Unix.) It doesn't seem necessary, but you'll have to convince the that's-the-way-it's-always-been brigade.
Re: graphical manuals
On Fri, 21 Jul 2023 22:33:09 -0500 Nate Bargmann wrote: > Looking at the railroad diagram, I wonder if there are enough drawing > characters in UTF-8 that they could be used for the diagrams rather > than generating image files that would likely not be useful for > terminal output. Thanks for reminding me, Nate. Here's a current result: $ groff -T utf8 -mandoc -pet ./gcobol-start.3c GCOBOL-START(3c) GCC COBOL GCOBOL-START(3c) NAME START position file for reading SYNOPSIS ? ??START??filename? ???FIRST??? ???LAST?? ?? ?? KEY ???compare?? name ?? ??? operator? ??? ?? IS ?? ??? ??? ???? ?LENGTHexpr??? ??WITH ?? ??? ??? INVALIDerror-statements ? KEY ? ?? NOT ? INVALIDvalid-statements?END-START?? ? KEY ? I haven't tried to understand exactly what's going on with that. pic is emitting troff input, and troff, I expect, is emitting drawing instructions in ditroff, which grotty renders. Something is evidently lost in translation. The grotty manual mentions, under BUGS: "There is no support for \D commands other than horizontal and vertical lines." Given that constraint, a useful rendering might be possible if the pic input took care to align the boxes and lines consistent with grotty's character matrix. But, how? An xterm determines its own font; it doesn't not respond to in-band font requests. And there is no way afaik for a troff drawing instruction to say "line right 7 characters; line down 3 lines", using whatever sizes the terminal decided on. That leaves us standing before my favorite hobbyhorse. The demise of Display Postscript doomed the possibility of a Unix graphical terminal. We had X, so applications could draw, but nothing like "printing to the screen", where a data stream could control a graphical terminal akin to how a data stream controls a graphical printer. Instead, we got HTML, and thence epub. What would you use your MacArthur grant for? I know what I would do: I would create VT-roff, an xterm that, instead of recognizing VT-100 control codes, would recognize ditroff(5) output. Then we could have manpages "in the terminal" as good as on paper, or a PDF. --jkl
Re: an.tmac, .TH: shows the same text twice in the header! Why necessary?
At 2023-07-22T19:21:39+, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > The text "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" is output twice in the header, > is once not enough and why? (Is this necessary(?)) It's tradition. See attachment. Also see groff's PROBLEMS file. * I don't like the page headers and footers produced by groff -man. There seem to be many different styles of page header and footer produced by different versions of the -man macros. You need to put modified macros from tmac/an.tmac into man.local. More information is available in groff_man(7). Regards, Branden signature.asc Description: PGP signature
