Re: [Groff] colorized man pages

[James K. Lowden]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 12:39:44 -0400
Peter Schaffter <address@hidden> wrote:

> > > Sadly, for all the advances, documentation has hardly budged,
> > > if indeed it's advanced at all.  Even though a good deal of
> > > it is maintained in typeset form, the output predominately is
> > > confined to the application with the poorest text rendering
> > > capability: the VT-100 emulator.
> 
> Am I the only one who finds that text at a terminal emulator with a
> well-chosen monspaced font and good contrast is much, much easier
> to read than a graphical representation of the same text (e.g. in a
> browser or pdf viewer)?

It's well established, is it not, that proportional fonts are easier to
read?  Isn't that why they dominate in books, magazines (remember 
them?) and the like?  

I use both.  When I'm scanning a man page for a particular feature,
such as a whether "groff -T" accepts "pdf" as an argument, viewing it
in a terminal is the quickest and most convenient.  When I'm reading
something longer to understand it for the first time, I much prefer
typeset text.  

Recently I had cause to consult Edward Moy's ctlseqs.ms from the xterm
distribution.  In HTML form it's clunky.  The PDF is crisp and
beautiful, easiest to read.  For scanning and double-checking, I kept
nroff output loaded in GNU less, too.  

Color and graphs can help illuminate material too.  In groff we have
pic, but it's unused in man pages.  Why?  Not because no one knows how
to use it, but because the typical man-page rendering environment
doesn't support it, despite the fact that's it's a child window in a
GUI!  

--jkl