Re: mdocml's .Ql doesn't map to original and GNU mdoc(7)

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Steffen,

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 01:17:46PM +0100:

> mdocml's mdoc.7 says
> 
>   Ql  single-quoted literal text: `text'
> 
> but that is not what .Ql is about:
> 
>   .Ql   The quoted literal macro behaves differently in troff
>         and nroff mode.  If formatted with @L_NROFF@(1)[221], a
>         quoted literal is always quoted.  If formatted with
>         troff, an item is only quoted if the width of the item
>         is less than three constant width characters.  This is
>         to make short strings more visible where the font
>         change to literal (constant width) is less noticeable.
> 
> The behaviour is already device-dependent in "old -mdoc", before
> 1991-03-07.

The .Ql macro is physical markup, so it is rarely used in modern
mdoc(7) documents.  Actually, i wouldn't know what purpose to
recommend it for, at all.

For terminal output, precise output compatibility with groff
matters.  For other output modes, not so much.  For a rather
obscure legacy macro such as .Ql, even less.  So i'd rather
keep output consistent across devices instead of emulating
historical behaviour.  Besides, PostScript and PDF output have
much worse formatting issues than this.  Even for HTML output,
there are more interesting things to do.

> (Without history i'm guessing, but maybe mdocml was
> ment for TTY only at first glance,

Not quite, the original motivation for mdoc*ML* was HTML output,
and for the first three months of development, HTML was the
only output mode.  Kristaps only started coding terminal output
on February 20, 2009.

> in which case the above is absolutely correct, but it lost that
> property once more output formats where added?)

No, that's not what happened.

Yours,
  Ingo
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