On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 23:06:30 -0400, Larry Kollar wrote: > Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:06:30 -0400 > From: Larry Kollar <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: "There is no place for hyphenation in a technical document." > Newsgroups: gmane.comp.printing.groff.general > To: Groff <[email protected]> > > > Valery Ushakov <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >>>> There is no place for hyphenation in a technical document > >> > > [...] > >> To be honest, I find Ingo’s “don’t hyphenate manpages” to be, in his > >> own words, overly broad. > > > > manpages are not meant to be primarily just read from paper. manpages > > must be searchable by a proverbial "desperate sysadmin at 3am". E.g., > > today I couldn't immediately find an instance of "overflow" in a man > > page b/c it was hyphenated. Hyphenation is destructive in this > > circumstances. > > That’s one thing that “man.local” and “mdoc.local” are for—you can turn > off hyphenation as needed. If the sysadmins need no hyphenation, and the > other users are OK with it, everybody gets what they want. > > The `-rHY=0` option works for both -man and -mdoc as well.
This argument can be made in both directions. My point is that the scenarios where the hyphenation for formatted manpages is unwanted is _far_ more prevalent, which probably should be reflected in the defaults. -uwe
