Re: [groff] anyone seen ".ny0" ?

[John Gardner]

*> Using ".if t" or ".if n" in a manual page is almost never a good idea.*

Uhm, how so? If an author wishes to provide some form of progressive
enhancement by offering improved rendering of certain content when
targeting PostScript/PDF output, what harm is done, exactly?

On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 at 06:42, Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Walter,
>
> Walter Harms wrote on Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 07:16:07PM +0100:
>
> > while looking at the xorg man pages there came
> > a question what this .ny0 may mean
> > I could not find this in the groff manual. It seems to do nothing.
>
> In general, the X.org manual pages are relatively low quality,
> in particular containing quite some cargo cult.  Thomas Dickey
> continued that tradition of cargo culting by keeping the .ny
> even though it does nothing:
>
>
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxt/commit/7bdec43f299d2538d66f65892766bf3c5dd27056
>
> I would say it is almost certain that it used to be some X11-specific
> hack decades ago that has never been maintained or tested since,
> because neither GNU troff nor Heirloom troff define an .ny or .ny0
> request.
>
> If you really wanted to understand what it was supposed to do in
> the 1980ies, you would have to look at revision histories and commit
> messages of that (X11R4?) era.
>
> But i don't really see the point.  If you want to improve the X.org
> manual pages, just remove all that poorly working cruft from the
> preamble and use standard idioms instead.
>
> In particular,
>
> -.de IN
> -..
>
> -.de ny
> -..
> -.ny 0
>
> would be obvious improvements, but it would probably also
> make sense to use the standard .BR instead of .ZN
> and the standard .RB instead of .Pn.
>
> Using ".if t" or ".if n" in a manual page is almost never a good idea.
>
> Yours,
>   Ingo
>
>