On Tue, Jun 18, 2024 at 12:47:09AM +0000, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > The table was just changed from having the first column too narrow to being > too > wide. > > What is wrong with using: > > "1) use ".nf" before table, and ".fi" after it"
Well, I was trying to avoid it, because this is fine when you're only considering the English text, but regrettably the lengths of translated strings are not usually the same as the original, and in some cases can be substantially longer. This is also why I try to avoid hacks such as calculating the widths of particular strings. I apparently added the text blocks here in 2011, and I don't appear to have written down exactly what the problem I was dealing with was. In some other similar cases I know that it was a problem with some translated pages having overly-wide tables (as can be seen in https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/6124c25e87). I suspect that I might just have been trying to make the handling of translatable text be the same across all tables in man-db's own manual pages. (The .na and .ad were your additions in https://bugs.debian.org/726266, but it seems that you didn't provide an explanation and I didn't ask for one.) Fundamentally, this is the old problem that text blocks in tbl are formatted in a diversion whose width is calculated in advance, and in the general case there's no very good way for manual page authors to handle this. However, despite all the above: in the intervening 13 years, no translations seem to have arisen that use long enough translations for these strings to cause the table to overflow 80 columns. I believe German comes closest by translating "bullet (middle dot)" to "Aufzählungszeichen (middle dot)", and it still fits. It's therefore probably fine to abandon the idea of text blocks in this particular case, and then neither .nf/.fi nor .na/.ad is needed to get reasonable formatting. I've simplified all this in https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/8c0076fa743fa015dbe2ea085eeddf78bde740c0, and I think the formatting is now as good as I can get it. Thanks, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
