*> Using ".if t" or ".if n" in a manual page is almost never a good idea.*
Uhm, how so? If an author wishes to provide some form of progressive enhancement by offering improved rendering of certain content when targeting PostScript/PDF output, what harm is done, exactly? On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 at 06:42, Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Walter, > > Walter Harms wrote on Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 07:16:07PM +0100: > > > while looking at the xorg man pages there came > > a question what this .ny0 may mean > > I could not find this in the groff manual. It seems to do nothing. > > In general, the X.org manual pages are relatively low quality, > in particular containing quite some cargo cult. Thomas Dickey > continued that tradition of cargo culting by keeping the .ny > even though it does nothing: > > > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxt/commit/7bdec43f299d2538d66f65892766bf3c5dd27056 > > I would say it is almost certain that it used to be some X11-specific > hack decades ago that has never been maintained or tested since, > because neither GNU troff nor Heirloom troff define an .ny or .ny0 > request. > > If you really wanted to understand what it was supposed to do in > the 1980ies, you would have to look at revision histories and commit > messages of that (X11R4?) era. > > But i don't really see the point. If you want to improve the X.org > manual pages, just remove all that poorly working cruft from the > preamble and use standard idioms instead. > > In particular, > > -.de IN > -.. > > -.de ny > -.. > -.ny 0 > > would be obvious improvements, but it would probably also > make sense to use the standard .BR instead of .ZN > and the standard .RB instead of .Pn. > > Using ".if t" or ".if n" in a manual page is almost never a good idea. > > Yours, > Ingo > >
