On 5/9/26 12:15 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
That is, of course, false. Terminal devices _can't change the font family_ and every terminal emulator that even weakly implements ECMA-48 lays out the screen as a uniform grid of character cells. That means that the font in use is _already monospaced_.Further, nothing about the rendering has changed on these devices. `\fC` was _always_ doing nothing in nroff mode.[3] It's just that now, GNU troff is _telling_ you that your command to it is, and always has been, futile (in nroff mode). Evidently that is unwelcome information.
If it's a no-op in nroff, and does something reasonable in troff, man page
authors don't have to write .if t and .if n conditionals. (Speaking as
someone who used to use \f(CW to force a constant-width font in troff.)
[...]
I think trying to get at inline Courier in man pages is a fool's
errand. I'm not 100% opposed to introducing yet another new macro
(pair--see below) to support it, because at least with a macro the
package can evaluate the font-change instruction and try to do
something sensible, and perhaps even string-configurable--but this
solution faces multiple strong headwinds.
First, many man(7) authors are besotted with `\f` escape sequences.
I'd say that those were the prevailing style when I began to learn to write
man pages in the late 80s. (And what's worse is that the existing man pages
I used as guides used \f3 and \f2, for an example of how we've evolved.)
For today? I don't know how common this is, but those inline font changes
are easier for me to use to emulate something like
@code{( @var{command} )}
and it helps me keep the text structure of the man page and info document
similar enough to spot typos and minor differences.
Since I maintain the bash documentation for two completely separate and
wildly different document formatters, sometimes it ends up with the style
of whichever one I used first when I write a particular section of text.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU [email protected] http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
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