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. --