Follow-up Comment #4, bug #68261 (group groff): [comment #3 comment #3:] > I certainly don't have solutions to everything (or anything) you ask, sorry, > but I can report from personal experience that it is correct that the warning > is "unwelcome information".
Under what circumstances did you encounter the warnings? Were you simply
reading a man page? Who was the vendor of your _man_(1) command?
> I venture to say that in most cases, the existing rendering was adequate, and
> spending time "fixing" it is not something maintainers want to do. I know I
> didn't.
That's why I ask the foregoing question. I don't want the diagnostic showing
up when/where the user can't do anything about it.
> So, maybe there could be some way to turn off that warning (or a more general
> warning control, of course) within the man page itself?
There is, but let me be clear what you're inquiring about. You want to know
to edit the man page so you won't "have to" edit the man page?
> I recognize the desire to give the warning by default, but having looked at
> the result and deemed it ok, it sure would nice to be able to stop it. Doing
> it external to the man page via options/envvars/etc. does not suffice, as we
> already discussed.
The comment I'm replying to was made anonymously; I don't know who you are or
which conversation you're referring to. Can you point me to it?
> It's really a function of the man page content, not the build environment.
That's a good argument for not supporting _any_ of the features in the
"Options" section of _groff_man_(7). And indeed that is how _man_(7)'s life
began in 1979.
History
M. Douglas McIlroy ⟨[email protected]⟩ designed,
implemented, and documented the AT&T man macros for Unix Version 7
(1979) and employed them to edit Volume 1 of its Programmer’s
Manual, a compilation of all man pages supplied by the system. The
package supported the macros listed in this page not described as
extensions, except P and the deprecated AT and UC. It documented
no registers and defined only R and S strings.
UC appeared in 3BSD (1980). Unix System III (1980) introduced P
and exposed the registers IN and LL, which had been internal to
Seventh Edition Unix man. PWB/Unix 2.0 (1980) added the Tm string,
subsequently incorporated into Unix System V (1983). 4BSD (1980)
added lq and rq strings. SunOS 2.0 (1985) recognized C, D, P, and
X registers.
All of the registers added in the 1980s changed what appeared on the page.
Were these features ill-advised?
> On other fronts, I don't see that it's necessary to invent support for
> monospace with all possible font axes. Just plain regular monospace is all
> anyone has ever wanted.
What you say was true for a few years in the early 1980s when the number of
text fonts expected of a troff installation grew from 3 to 4. See, for
example,
[https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/man/man1/cw.1
the Unix System III _cw_ command].
Why, then, did other monospaced fonts arise? Knuth's original Computer Modern
fonts for TeX, for example, included a `CW` fact...and `CWI`, abbreviating
"constant-width" and "constant-width italic", respectively, one presumes,
though their official names used the word "typewriter" instead.
[https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grodvi.1.html See _grodvi_(1).]
> Also, .CS/.CE (if that's what you're saying, not sure) seems fine to me. I
> would have used it if it had been available.
Okay, I'm keeping the idea pinned to my mental bulletin board with a flag on
it.
> People want to use inline monospaced typewriter; your arguments that they
> "shouldn't" do not eliminate that desire. Giving them a clear way to do so
> seems desirable to me.
They _can_ use it. Let me show you an example.
Here's a screen shot of my terminal window when I run the following command
after editing the _grodvi_(1) man page to set some words in the first
paragraph of its description with inline monospaced typewriter.
Command:
$ MANROFFOPT="-P-i" /usr/bin/man ./build/src/utils/grog/grog.1
Screenshot attached.
By the way, the foregoing command produces no warnings.
Can you tell me which words are typeset in inline monospaced typewriter?
(file #58603)
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