Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 11:36:42AM -0500:
> A. Always set command names in bold. > B. Always set man page topics in bold. I'd answer "both" (except that, less importantly, in cross references with trailing section numbers in parentheses, roman is preferable). > At 2018-11-15T06:31:21+0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote: >> As Ingo says: only placeholders get italic, the rest gets bold >> tagging. For syntax elements, that is. Of course, italics for stress emphasis of normal English words also exists. > That's a much broader mandate than what you quoted above. It would mean > I also need to revert my recent changes of environment variables to > italics, Environment variable names are typically all caps, so they already stand out and do not necessarily need any markup at all. When available, it may be a good idea to set them in a monospace font; at least that's what i do in mandoc.css. Same for preprocessor-#define'd constants and for errno(2) constants. But that's not really an option for man(7) documents because the man(7) language does not provide any way to portably request a monospace font. Some people try to use various low-portability idioms like \fC, \f(CW, \f(CR, often causing formatter-dependent and even output-device-dependent trouble, so i wouldn't recommend trying that in man(7) documents. In case this seems to contradict what i said earlier: the rationale is that names of environment variables ought to be formatted in a uniform way. However, some function almost like keywords (HOME, LC_CTYPE, ...) while many others can be freely chosen by the user. So neither bold nor italics would fit all cases - together with the argument above, that motivates the answer of "roman". All that said, what to do with environment variable names is much less clear than with command names. I don't particularly like making them italic, but i can live with it - in man(7) documents only, of course, there is no problem with them in mdoc(7). > and abort my intentions to migrate file specifications to > italics. Actually, no, i fully agree with setting file names in italics. Again, having uniform formatting for filenames is more important than the bold/italic rule. In many cases, filenames can be freely chosen by the user, so italics are appropriate. The consequence that fixed filenames like /etc/fstab also end up in italics is unavoidable. Yours, Ingo
