Re: [Groff] The case against the case against .EX/.EE & .DS/.DE

[Meg McRoberts]

Personally, I would prefer having .nf/.in/.fi used in man pages
over .DS/.DE -- the display macros hold the contents on a single
page and when writing man pages that might be rendered in plain text,
PDF/PS, or HTML, I'm not crazy about this model.

I am only a writer who has written a lot of docs using *roff so I
can't claim any expertise about groff coding.  But I remember the
time when docs were rendered only in printed form and, for, man pages,
the online text.  We invested a lot of time and energy in controlling
the page breaks and such and it was a tough transition when we started
rendering docs into HTML where the user could control the font size
and so forth, so line breaks and page breaks were no longer under our
control.

I do like mm's .ne functionality -- this allows the writer to specify
that the next <x> lines need to stay together on a page -- it might force
a page break if there isn't enough space left on the page, but it won't
force a page break if there is room.  But .DS/DE get really problematic
in a world where the output varies so greatly.

Meg

--- "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> > > It shows me that in my corpus, DS is in
> > > these 21 files:
> > 
> > Okay, so this effectively means that two people assume .DS
> > exists, a Mutt and a FreeRADIUS documentation author. So I
> > would not assume that it had been part of a variant of -man
> > before.
> 
> You could be right.  They might well both have gotten confused
> and imported it separately from mm.
> 
> Regardless of where it came from, it would still be the second most
> effective way to clean .ti, .in, and .nf/.fi calls out of my corpus.
> -- 
>               <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
> 
> 
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