On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:55:31PM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote: > On Wed, 26 Feb 2014 11:46:32 +0000 > Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: > >>>> man pages don't really need expressive typography. >>> >>> Man pages are constrained by xterm. A better display system would >>> invite tables, graphs, equations, and links. >> >> I don't think they are. Or they didn't used to be. It was common to >> see man pages with `.if n' and `.if t', with the troff presenting the >> same data in better form, e.g. ASCII art versus pic(1). man pages >> used to be commonly printed and high-quality output desired > > Hi Ralph, > > Like Deri, from time to time I render a man page with -Tps, when I want > to look over it carefully or find myself referring back to it while > working on something unfamiliar or fiddly. But I would bet 4 people in > 5 who type "man foo" don't know there's a typesetter behind it. > > So many people are so accustomed to nroff output of man pages that most > web sites emulate its single worst characteristic, monospace fonts. > And the results are either comical or tragic: > > https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/darwin/reference/manpages/man7/groff_char.7.html > or > http://man.cx/groff_char(7) > > Apparently you can have either acceptable formatting with monospace > fonts and forgo knowing what Å looks like, or you can see the character > while imagining how the page should be formatted. :-( > > I submit to you that if our command-line environment weren't still using > 1980s technology to emulate 1970s hardware, we would have more > graphical and unified documentation. In other words, the terminal is > the problem.
So if you see a guy trying to make a phone call with a hammer you think that the problem is the hammer. Besides, don't you have a better way of judging the usefulness of a tool than the fashion (70s, 80s) approach? Will you stop drinking water or breathing oxygen the day some multinational tell you is outdated to sell you a modern alternative? Finally, what does mean "more graphical and unified documentation"? And why that would be an improvement? > > Luckily, the terminal is also the solution. Or, rather, a different > terminal would be. I call it VT-roff: > > http://www.schemamania.org/troff/vt-roff.pdf The output of the other two examples is by far more readable than this pdf. May I think the problem is the groff postscript interpreter? > > Just a small matter of programming. ;-) > > --jkl > Stop looking for the bug in the software, believe me the bug is not there. Use your creativeness to solve problems (first yours) not to create more.
