Hi Ted, Ted Unangst wrote on Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 03:47:56AM -0400:
> ul appears somewhat useless for its intended purpose. > > echo _xxx_ | ul does not result in underlined text in an xterm, > so I doubt many people are using this. > > Unlike, say, mandoc, it can't output Greek letters. > I also imagine most people have moved on to some form > of markdown for their other text markup needs. Your sentence sounds a bit like "mandoc can do the same, just better". That statement would be totally misleading. Experimenting a bit with ul(1), i just learnt something new: Actually, mandoc(1) *output* is exactly what ul(1) expects as *input*. Compare: $ echo '.Fl o Ar arg' | mandoc -mdoc On the terminal, you see no underlining and no bold face. $ echo '.Fl o Ar arg' | mandoc -mdoc | ul Now, the "-o" is bold and the "arg" is underlined. $ echo '.Fl o Ar arg' | mandoc -mdoc | less $ echo '.Fl o Ar arg' | mandoc -mdoc -l Again, both of these do show bold and underlined text on the terminal because less(1) includes functionality similar to ul(1). > Will anyone miss it? I didn't use it so far, but now that you made me look at it, i'm likely to start using it almost daily. I often felt unhappy that my gmdiff tool (for comparing groff and mandoc output) does not show bold and underline fonts and i always had to pipe the gmdiff output to less, even if it was short. Calling ul(1) at the end of the gmdiff script elegantly fixes that problem. Unless people strongly insist on killing the ul(1) utility, i'm planning to fix the ul(1) manual page. I does indead lack essential information, i RTFS to understand the purpose of the utility. Thanks for the pointer, Ingo
