At 2018-04-20T23:19:44+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > >> man://mandoc.1#EXIT_STATUS > > > Now, as for the SHOUTY SHOUTY... > > That's not a matter of SHOUTING, but of case sensitivity. > The name of that standard section in man(7) and mdoc(7) > is "EXIT STATUS", not "Exit Status" nor "Exit status" > nor "exit status". Case is preserved, consider:
> That's a bad idea. I admit that many authors use unusual and even > inconsistent casing in section headers (even in the very mandoc.1)-:, > which may sometimes seem awkward. But in technical documentation, > casing is often deliberate, and automatically changing it based on > natural language rules is prone to make information incorrect in > some cases. I disagree with most of this analysis. As far as I can tell this was a presentational decision, similar to the one that led to the Unix trademark being shown in small caps. I don't recall the reference but the reason was not because Unix was supposed to be in full caps--it's not an acronym, after all--but just to show off a fancy font on the typesetter. In my opinion, which I am far too young and poorly-connected to have proffered when it would have made any difference, the forced-full-capitalization of section titles in man page sources is an information-destroying transform done in the wrong place at the wrong time. Section headings should be capitalized as section titles normally are in technical documentation: either like work titles, or first-letter only, with the normal rules for proper nouns and adjectives respected. It would be better if man-db (or similar) set a *roff variable that the macro package would check to see if case transformation on section headings was desired. The default, for the next n years, of course, would be to go ahead and do the transformation to avoid shocking people. This has been itching me for many years; thanks for the excuse to air my grievance. ;-) -- Regards, Branden
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