Is this maintained some place on the Web I can check it out? Perhaps the most common is https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source/blob/trunk/texk/makeindexk/makeindex.1
If you prefer to eschew github, current version also at https://mirrors.ctan.org/indexing/makeindexk/makeindex.1 Your comments are (gulp :) welcome. As background, I did not write the man page (nor any of the other significant tex-world man pages), I am merely stuck maintaining them. My overall goal is to spend as little time as possible doing so, although I did make an effort this last year to update the basics (tex(1), pdftex(1), etc.) to at least somewhat resemble current reality vs. the 1980s reality in which they were written. And I'm lot more interested in updating the content of the man pages than worrying about the niceties of presentation, portability, etc. This whole thread would never have arisen if the original makeindex(1) author had not used \fC ... I wasn't trying to persuade you of anything Yep, I got that and appreciated it. Not every single tiny code fragment in bash(1) _does_ have quotes around I'm glad to hear it :). I agree, which is why I recommend quotation only for multi-word inline literals and for disambiguation with English. Sounds sensible to me. that it has started _telling_ the user of the failure. I understand. But isn't the plethora of reports about this an indication that the previous (non-)behavior was perfectly sufficient for most people? Seems like it. What dinosaur maintainers like me find highly objectionable is having to spend time getting back to the apparently-working-fine-for-many-years status quo ante. \fC is nothing compared to the misbegotten madness (IMHO :) of C23 ... Here's some stuff from our man pages you might have overlooked. For sure. Thanks. By the way, I wonder if it would be useful for the groff distribution to include a single pdf document with all of groff's .7 man pages (maybe also .1's and .5's, for that matter), with a brief introduction and listing. I, at least, would find such a thing highly convenient to have. Such overviews + tables-of-contents are not where man pages shine .. it is hard to know what's even available without some digging. on how hard a man(7) document tries to impose its own preferences. Yes, I know. I've come across many man pages that decide they just love filling and hyphenation and resist all attempts at change. Such is life. the author is simply lazy or doesn't want to be bothered to mark unhyphenable literals with a prefixed `\%` My experience is that approximately 0% of man page authors, definitely including me, think about wrong hyphenation of their inline "code" texts. I've never seen a % on, say, \fIstdout\fP. I don't doubt that you yourself have made updates to your man pages in these regards, but in the wild, not ... Please use the string and register settings documented above. Ack, thanks. *roff doesn't foreclose [presentation vs. content] Of course, but that's theory. It's not practice. Especially not 1980s practice. *** BEGIN POLITICAL DIGRESSION *** Thanks for the entertaining digression :). if the GNU guys had trouble coming up with a kernel, ... I've often wondered about a counterfactual world where rms wrote a kernel in the late 1980s, instead of "waiting for Mach". It probably would have ended up in more or less the same place we find ourselves, though. Computing involves too much money and too much power (not the electrical kind, though that too) nowadays for any "source must be available" to prevail, seems to me. Anyway. It would seem unwise to overstate RMS's pro-TeX partisanship, Certainly agreed. The TeX community later came to flirt fairly seriously with non-free licensing Yes, I am well aware of these licensing issues/quirks/woes in TeX history. Will skip the rehash ... [2] https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/tmac/an.tmac?id=39d2cefa07d58c856e9e7b0b5f5e8380e949727d :) Happy formatting :), Karl
