Re: Basic implementation of .Bk/.Ek

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Jason,

> i'll request this again, publicly: Bk/Ek makes no sense for synopsis.

I tend to agree:  We do need a .Bk implementation even for the SYNOPSIS
to deal with existing pages, but always writing stuff like

.Bk -words
.Op o Ar file
.Ek

for each and every single argument is positively tedious, and figuring
out for which argument it is needed because it will end up near the end
of the line is tedious, too, fragile when adding arguments, and finally
broken now that we have -Owidth=width.

[...]
> what i'd like, though i have no idea if it's practical:
> mandoc recognises these macros but ignores them completely.

I think when present, they should be honoured, even in the SYNOPSIS.

> instead, it always formats SYNOPSIS in a way which causes no line
> break in the wrong place.  is that a possibility?

I suspect we will be able to identify a couple of cases that
basically always want to be wrapped in .Bk inside the SYNOPSIS,
and make that automatic.  For example, the following cases
come to mind:

 * We probably never want a line break in the middle of .Op
   or between .Oo and .Oc.
 * We probably never want a line break between .Fl and
   immediately following .Ar.

The trick is to unambiguously describe these cases and not just
resort to "do not break where it looks ugly" because that's kind
of hard to implement.  :)

I should like attacking that task after fixing more of the
outright bugs still keeping us company.

By the way, decent .Bk support is now committed both to bsd.lv
and openbsd.org.

Yours,
  Ingo
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