At 2017-04-23T12:10:03-0400, Doug McIlroy wrote: > Interesting difference in habits. I never look at groff-ed man pages > on line--only the default nroff, which is fine for pasting, and more > importantly, examinable with a full-featured editor.
A lot of (GNU/)Linux systems these days are configured with UTF-8-capable terminal emulators by default, so grotty emits UTF-8 characters. Even 15-20 years ago, on my Debian systems at least, I was getting ISO 8859-1 to my consoles and xterms, and those damned hyphens would show up if the source was wrong. So the former advantage was lost with the march of post-ASCII progress, but the latter remains. In fact, with a font with good glyph coverage like FreeFont (Mono)[1], every glyph save two in groff_char(7) renders, and bold and italics look nice. > And I don't see how a typist can foresee what I am going to paste text > into any better than AI can. After all, I write man pages and other > documents *about* programs in volume comparable to programs > themselves. There have been a few attempts at "manlint" programs over the years but all seem to have died away. Perhaps the fate of "lint" itself points to the correct solution; maybe we should be adding coaching diagnostics into groff (and its macro packages) itself, where they can be enabled with a flag. The triple-overloading of codepoint 45 in ASCII as hyphen-minus-dash sure did impose a technical debt. :( Regards, Branden
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