Hi Larry, Larry Kollar wrote on Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 10:06:13AM -0500:
> .de FILE > .FONT CB \\$1 R \&. CI \\$2 > .. > .FILE name ext I fully agree that structural markup is usually more useful than physical markup; however, man(7) does not have any structural markup macros so far, so it's not a good idea to start adding structural markup like .FILE to man(7) now. Of course that doesn't apply to the idea of .FONT, which would still be physical markup. If people want structural markup in manuals, they use mdoc(7). > Yes, the humble manpage format has escaped the confines of *roff? > so any extensions have to be considered carefully. Yes, according to what i know, man(7) was first implemented outside *roff by Henry Spencer in 1991 (awf), and mdoc(7) was first implemented outside *roff by Kristaps Dzonsons in 2008 (mandoc); for details, see: http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html However, that's not the main problem. I don't think that awf/cawf are actively maintained and i'm not aware of other man(7) parsers, and Kristaps and myself could implement man extensions in mandoc(1); actually, mandoc(1) already supports part of man-ext even though we don't like it and don't see the point. What i'm concerned about is traditional roff. If you extend man, a few people will start using these extensions in their new manuals, so you gratuitiously make life harder for people trying to still support platforms using traditional roff variants that don't have these extensions. Yours, Ingo
