At 2020-10-31T15:58:00+0100, Jan Stary wrote: > Hi Branden, > > as an author of manpages for command-line utilities, I want to type > e.g. `this' into a manpage source like `this' because that's exactly > what you type on the cmdline and that's what I want the user to read > in the manpage.
Okay. Do you ever view your man pages with -Tps or -Tpdf?
> To be sure: are you proposing that manpage authors type something else
> than `that',
It depends on what, exactly, they want. In ASCII, they didn't have much
choice. In Latin-1, some of them thought, incorrectly, they they had
some choice, but didn't, because an acute accent ยด is not a quotation
mark of any sort.
And now, with UTF-8, they have choices but pretend they don't.
Man page authors are a turbulent bunch.
> or that formatters display something else? Having to type anything
> else (in the name of good typography) is making me jump through hoops.
Well, there's always plain text for the full WYSIWYG experience.
> I'm all for good typography. In a book,
Are man pages conceivable book content?
> But in a manpage, I want to just type e.g. ` and the formatter
> to display ` and the reader to see ` because that's what
> you type when you run the command.
Again I encourage you to try viewing your pages with -Tps or -Tpdf.
> > > > 6. Revert the change an un-fix the misuses of ` and ' in code
> > > > specimens that I've been repairing for the past few years.
>
> What "misuse"?
Commit cc7971dfc0865893e5bc95584e5e0b80ae00d664.
> Having `this' in a manpage is perfectly good typography,
It's the idiom for producing single-quoted text in all roff documents
since the early 1970s, that much is true.
> because that's exatly what you type when you use the command.
Your experiences may differ from mine, but I never have to pair ` with '
at the Unix command line. The only places I see this pairing come up
are not at shell prompts or in scripts, or when writing in C or any of
its descendants, but in groff, TeX, and m4.
> I don't see any benefit in having to type or display something else.
ASCII gives you 94 visible glyphs[1]. How do you propose to obtain any
that it doesn't cover?
> What do you argue _is_ the benefit? A more beautiful manpage that
> says something else than what it wants to say?
The benefit is a man page that renders as documented by groff whether
the output device is a UTF-8 terminal emulator, PostScript, PDF, or
HTML.
> > > manual pages are written by software developers,
> > > not by typesetters, who are used to typing programming languages
> > > and who are used to the fact, from the past, that these five
> > > characters do not need escaping.
>
> Exactly.
I have a few more questions.
Do your man pages ever use the sequence '\-'? If so, why?
How do you represent backslashes in your man pages--for example, if you
needed to document 'printf "foo\n"' to your readers?
Are `these' symmetrical glyphs for you?
Regards,
Branden
[1] And the semantics of several of its code points were _deliberately
amibiguous_, a devil's bargain for which we are still paying.
https://www.aivosto.com/articles/charsets-7bit.html
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