Re: [groff] Advice wanted on drawing a file tree with pic

[John Gardner]

> I'm trying to help out another project (quilt) with some
> non-portability in one of their man pages.  Right now they're
> embedding raw UTF-8 codepoints into text to use line-drawing
> characters to depict a file hierarchy.

Oh man, I'm so glad I'm not the only one who's tried doing that with
tree(1) output...

I actually found myself in Brandan's shoes, but then I learned mandoc
doesn't do line-drawing, so I nuked the entire diagram.

Moral of the story: don't write manpages if your editor font has
spiffy-looking box-drawing symbols that seamlessly connect, it never ends
well for productivity. =(

On 6 June 2018 at 21:39, Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Branden,
>
> > I'm trying to help out another project (quilt) with some
> > non-portability in one of their man pages.  Right now they're
> > embedding raw UTF-8 codepoints into text to use line-drawing
> > characters to depict a file hierarchy.
>
> https://manned.org/quilt.1#head7 shows
>
>     work/
>     ├── patches/
>     │    ├── series         (list of patches to apply)
>     │    ├── patch1.diff    (one particular patch)
>     │    ├── patch2.diff
>     │    └── ...
>     ├── .pc/
>     │    ├── .quilt_patches (content of QUILT_PATCHES)
>     │    ├── .quilt_series  (content of QUILT_SERIES)
>     │    ├── patch1.diff/   (copy of patched files)
>     │    │    └── ...
>     │    ├── patch2.diff/
>     │    │    └── ...
>     │    └── ...
>     └── ...
>
> Indentation alone would seem sufficient to expose the hierarchy,
> but if they are intent on drawing lines.
>
> > Therefore please critique the following PIC.
>
> pic seems overkill.  It seems to me they need three strings defined that
> render to the same width.
>
>     VER  |    │
>
>     TEE  |--  ├──
>
>     ELL  '--  └──
>
> A replacement shows it covers their tree.
>
>     work/
>     TEE patches/
>     VER  TEE series         (list of patches to apply)
>     VER  TEE patch1.diff    (one particular patch)
>     VER  TEE patch2.diff
>     VER  ELL ...
>     TEE .pc/
>     VER  TEE .quilt_patches (content of QUILT_PATCHES)
>     VER  TEE .quilt_series  (content of QUILT_SERIES)
>     VER  TEE patch1.diff/   (copy of patched files)
>     VER  VER  ELL ...
>     VER  TEE patch2.diff/
>     VER  VER  ELL ...
>     VER  ELL ...
>     ELL ...
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
> https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
>
>