Re: [groff] 01/04: nroff(1): Fix style and content issues.

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-11-15T06:31:21+0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> >>>> + Set "@address@hidden", "groff", "grotty", and "locale"(1) in italics,
> >>>>   not bold or roman.
> >>> [...]
> >>> > -.B @address@hidden
> >>> > +.I @address@hidden
> >>> 
> >>> I think these particular B -> I changes are wrong and ought to be
> >>> reverted.
> 
> I agree with Ingo.  Since ages such items have been tagged with
> boldface in most manpages.

Oh, bummer.  Vetoes from 2 committers is more of a fight than I want.

Okay.  How much of Ingo's position are you endorsing?  Just the quoted
bit?

And how would you like me interpret what you've quoted?

        A. Always set command names in bold.
        B. Always set man page topics in bold.

> Please bear in mind that most people read manpages not on paper or
> with a PDF viewer but on terminals.  Regarding the `distractness
> factor', it hardly makes a difference whether you look at bold or
> underlined text.

Well, it does to _me_, but I may be in a minority...

> Other man page readers like the one in the Midnight
> Commander (mc) use colours instead (yellow for boldface, red for
> italics).

Yes, and the Real Fix(tm) for this is a semantic macro extension to
man(7) so that people can set some registers to impose their own
stylesheet on man page output if desired.

> As Ingo says: only placeholders get italic, the rest gets bold
> tagging.

That's a much broader mandate than what you quoted above.  It would mean
I also need to revert my recent changes of environment variables to
italics, and abort my intentions to migrate file specifications to
italics.  There's lots of historical precedent for both, but...

-- 
Regards,
Branden

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature