Hello Bernd, Bernd Warken wrote on Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 03:44:55PM +0100:
[...] > Examples: > .FONT I text1 R text2 I text3 R text4 > is equivalent to .IR text1 text2 text3 text4 I don't particularly like the idea; changing the font for individual strings is very low level manipulation. Groff does have established syntax for that, namely \fItext1 \fRtext2 \fItext3 \fRtext4. Arguably, that's not particularly nice syntax, but it is how roff syntax looks like: this century is not the right time to change basic roff syntax. Besides, i see no point in making low-level operations look nice syntactically. Nice syntax is good for high-level macros, no doubt, but rather pointless for the gory low-level stuff. > Maybe we could rename .FONT or .FT and add it to the man macros > in an-old.tmac. Above, i assume you want to do that for all of roff. If you just propose it for groff_man(7), i have an even stronger counter-argument. The man(7) language is no longer useful for writing new documentation by hand. Nowadays, people either generate man(7) code from preprocessors like pod2man(1) or DocBook or whatever or they use the more modern, more expressive mdoc(7) language. What man(7) still *is* useful for is backward-compatibility with archaic systems that still lack mdoc(7) - like Solaris. By extending man(7) functionality, you would destroy that last asset man(7) has. Or let me put it that way, it's called an-old.tmac for a reason. Do fix bugs there, but don't change the way it works. Yours, Ingo
