Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 12:22:08AM +1100:
> Along with for the paragraphing macros, the font-styling macros are > among the very most frequently used. So, a significant minority of man(7) macros roaming the wild are part of the unusual macro class (.BI etc. and .IP) that sometimes requires argument quoting, a bit over 20% according to your count. Then again, cases where arguments to those actually do contain spaces and hence do require quoting are relatively rare, so quoting is still unusual, and authors writing man(7) code still need to understand why and in which exceptional cases it is needed. For .SS, on the other hand, containing spaces is the rule rather than the exception: logically, .SS introduces just a line of text. So what are you making simpler by asking that that line be given as a single quoted argument rather than just as a line in the natural way? I don't think asking people to quote .SS arguments helps to understand .BI any better. Yours, Ingo P.S. The topic of Companies like Bogus Inc.\& etc.\& like \&.macro quoting a lot. doesn't seem fully settled either, but i fear it may cause confusion to mix discussions of different topics in the same thread. P.P.S. Regarding refer(1), if you think it can help, i suggest you just show what you have in mind for a single manual page to demonstrate how it would look like; that approach hopefully wouldn't force you to invest large amounts of work, yet it might help evaluation (or refinement?) of the idea. Quite possible it's a good idea, but i'm sure i don't fully grasp it yet.
