Re: [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

(Ted Harding) <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 03-Jan-07 Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
> > You could use a console/curses-based browser, right? lynx or
> > elinks or w3m. I'd think paging through a man page with one of
> > those would be much the same as you have with less(1) now. Except,
> > for one thing, you'd actually be able to follow inline hyperlinks.
>
> This has pros (like being able to follow hyperlinks) and cons -- like
> the fact that with 'less' you can scroll through line by line, while
> with 'lynx' you get a screenfull of text at a time, which flips to
> the next screenful when you reach the bottom (so you cannot see part
> of the previous screen along with part of the current screen).

A compromise is possible - in the Heirloom Toolchest "man"
command, I use w3m -dump to read HTML pages and the use the
regular pager to display them. True, you lose the ability to
follow web links directly, but this is not actually that much
of a problem with X copy-and-paste, and besides, I very rarely
follow hyperlinks in manual pages anyway.

That said, most HTML manual pages I have seen so far look ugly
just because their visual layout is inferior to that of -man,
e.g. regarding indenting, but this is fixable. Also no web
browser I know of is able to hyphenate text. Ultimately, I also
have yet to see a web browser that implements paragraph-at-once
line breaking à la Knuth-Plass, as I have done in Heirloom nroff :-)

        Gunnar