Thanks for the suggestions. Possibly too late for upcoming smartmontools
7.4, but will be addressed later.
In general, non-trivial syntax changes require tests with several
formatting tools including those used on Free/Net/OpenBSD. Changes shall
also work with older tool versions still used by LTS distributions.
Using \(en may make sense and is already used elsewhere in the man page
source files. This is IMO a minor issue. The visible difference with
"groff -man -Tpdf" is small.
The \& are not needed because we always format these files manually and
review plaintext and pdf formatted versions afterwards.
Please note that the patch itself could not be used because it only
fixes the generated Debian specific version of this page. This file
hides the info specific to other platforms in comments. See the long
MAN_FILTER macro in Makefile.am for the details.
The patch only addresses a single file. Such general changes should be
done for all four *.[58].in files from the sourcecode with a single commit.
Regards,
Christian
