Re: mandoc mishandles tzfile(5)'s .IP \(bu "\w'\(bu 'u"

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

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Hi Branden,

On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 03:30:59AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> At 2023-10-22T17:41:28-0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > On 2023-10-22 14:06, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > > mandoc only supports ASCII strings as arguments to \w, not escape
> > > sequences or formatting instructions.
> > 
> > For the TZDB man pages mandoc need not support all that, just \(bu.
> > 
> > Just to make sure we're on the same page, I reproduced the problem by
> > running the command "mandoc -man -Tascii t.5", where t.5 contains the
> > following lines:
> > 
> >         .TH tzfile 5
> >         .SH NAME
> >         .IP \(bu "\w'\(bu  'u"
> >         xxx
> >         .PP
> >         yyy
> 
> At the risk of being simplistic, why not just give `IP` an explicit
> measurement as an argument?
> 
> .IP \(bu 2n

He feels that IP \(bu 3n is too long of a space in PDF.  "\w'\(bu  'u"
has the benefit of being 3n in terminals, but shorter in PDF.

This was triggered after my suggestion of using 3[n] instead of 2[n] to
clearly separate the bullet from the bulleted text, as docuemented in
man-pages(7).

Cheers,
Alex

> 
> (Or 3n, or 4n, or whatever looks best to you.)
> 
> > The output should contain two spaces between the bullet's "o" and the
> > "x", but with current mandoc it contains five spaces.
> 
> If you're viewing on a terminal, `.IP \(bu 3n` should achieve this.[1]
> 
> (Typesetters are a different story because how wide a bullet is depends
> on the output device and the font.)
> 
> I'm not saying that better mandoc(1) support for `\w` would be an awful
> thing to have, but it doesn't seem necessary, to me, to solve this
> specific problem.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden
> 
> [1] Strictly, you can leave the "n" off, but I consider that slightly
>     sloppy, and I think that the explicit scaling unit is also helpful
>     as a reminder to the man page author that `IP`'s second argument,
>     unlike most arguments to man(7) macros, will _not_ be formatted as
>     text.

I might take that.

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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