Re: mandoc -man -Thtml: unwanted line break after bullet (.IP)

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Alejandro,

Alejandro Colomar wrote on Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 03:17:07PM +0200:

> mandoc -man -Thtml produces a line break after a .IP \[bu] 3
> groff(1) doesn't, which is consistent with how both mandoc(1) and
> groff(1) format that code in a terminal.
> 
> Is that behavior intended, or accidental?

So far, i'm unable to reproduce your problem.

With the test file appended below and the command

  mandoc -Thtml -Ostyle=mandoc.css test.1 > test.html

i get the expected semantically correct output containing
dl, dt, and dd elements, but not the br element that you claim
to be present in the output you get.  Specifically:

  <p class="Pp">initial text</p>
  <dl class="Bl-tag">
    <dt>&#x2022;</dt>
    <dd>final text</dd>
  </dl>

For testing, i have also put up the file here:

  https://man.bsd.lv/Test/test.1

The output looks correct to me.  There certainly isn't any line break
after the bullet; as expected, the "final text" follows on the same
line.

Needless to say, when you worry about white space issues in web
design, correctly using CSS is essential, because obviously, the
HTML code only specifies the semantic structure of the text but
does *not* specifiy physical formatting details like white space
or line breaks.

Can you be more specific which input file, which mandoc command,
and which CSS file you are using?

If you worry about the relatively wide indentation of the "final text",
that's because mandoc.css hardcodes "margin-left: 5.5em;"
for the .Bl-tag class.  Theoretically, mandoc(1) could honour
the .IP width argument by adding an explicit, physical-formatting
"style" attribute to the individial HTML dl element.  But adding
style attributes to individual HTML elements is considered
deprecated and very bad style in modern HTML, so mandoc doesn't
do that.

This really isn't specific to mandoc but applies to all web design
in general.  If you use any HTML autogeneration tool (not just
mandoc) and embed any *physical* formatting instructions into
your document source code (in this case, the width argument "3"),
such crowbar-style coding will usually result in poor formatting
or be ignored outright by the HTML generation tool.

> You can check it in the same ftm(7) page that I reported a bug
> recently.

After copying

  https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/manpages/ftm.7.en.html

to my server at

  https://man.bsd.lv/Test/ftm.7#Feature_test_macros_understood_by_glibc

i can't see the problem neither there nor on manpages.debian.org.
Note that manpages.debian.org *does* use the mandoc rendering engine,
so having a bug in mandoc that does not show up on manpages.debian.org
would be slightly surprising, unless the bug was recently introduced
in mandoc.

Anyway, on both servers, i do not see line breaks after the bullets.
For example, look at the lines:

  The macros that you most likely need to use ...
  Defining _XOPEN_SOURCE with a value of 700 or greater ...

Yours,
  Ingo


.TH TEST 1
.SH NAME
test \- test
.SH DESCRIPTION
initial text
.IP \[bu] 3
final text
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