At 2018-11-15T18:16:59+0100, Ingo Schwarze 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.
This might be the _only_ uncontroversial point. My toy semantic extension tmac file already has .EMPH and .STRONG. :) > > 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. We already do it with .EX/.EE, but that's hidden within the macro implementation so, in my view, it's fair play. Varying *roff front-ends and output devices can (and should) be coped with there, not foisted off on the poor man page writer. > 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. Indeed. I'm quoting all of the above to reinforce just how fragile the seemingly simple "literal -> bold; replaceable -> italic" paradigm actually is. My numerous style commits have not been whimsical; one reason I write at length, testing Ralph's patience, is to expose my rationales and motivations. You and I will likely still disagree about what we'd like to see markup-wise in the terminal window, but I think it would be altogether a better world if we made fun of each other's $HOME/.troffrc files while the groff man pages, at least, were pleasantly semantic and above the fray. :) -- Regards, Branden
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