Re: [Suggestion]: Document that the Er macro can be used as a width.

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Stephen,

Jan Stary wrote on Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 10:32:07AM +0200:
> On Sep 27 11:51:10, dev@sgregoratto.me wrote:

>> I'm currently rewriting the Illumos manpages in mdoc, and I realised
>> from looking at the OpenBSD manuals, that the error list is set up as
>> such:
>> 
>> .Bl -tag -width Er
>> .It Bq Er ENOTTY
>> ...
>> 
>> This is a really neat feature that I think deserved to be documented.
>> AFAIK only Ds gets this treatment. Apparently it resolves to 17n from
>> looking at mdoc_validate.c:/^macro2len/.

https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7#Bl says:

  The -width and -offset arguments accept macro names as described for
  Bd -offset, scaling widths as described in roff(7), or use the length
  of the given string.

And then https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7#offset :

>   The most popular is the imaginary macro Ds,
>   which resolves to 6n.

I'm not quite sure what you are proposing.

Listing all the default widths for all the macros would seem like
exposing too much irrelevant information to me.

Note that except for .Er, this feature is very rarely used, and it is
not really needed in practice, so isn't it better to treat the details
as implementation details and not document them, keeping the text short?

Or what exactly would you want documented?

Yours,
  Ingo
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