Re: Plan 9 man added a new macro for man page references

[Russ Cox]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 7:27 AM G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Plan 9 went and did an interesting thing[1].  They implemented a macro
> just for man page cross-references.

I am amazed you found that so quickly.

> * Uses \X escapes to throw X commands at the output device enabling the
>   synthesis of a URL with appropriately placed link text boundaries.

This I did back in 2004, for what it's worth.

> Here's what I would have done differently or in addition.
>
> * Named the macro MR ("manual reference") to give it even more semantic
>   weight.  If "IM" is mnemonic for something, I haven't figured out
>   what.

It was "italic manual reference", but I took your suggestion and
changed it to MR.
Thanks!

> * Implemented that string macro, and probably called it MF ("manref
>   font") or "RF" (reference font).
> * Broken the syntactical parallel with .IR, thus:
>     .MR page-name section [hidden-page-anchor]

I broke the parallel with IR as well, but differently.
$3 is the roman punctuation to follow (without spaces)
after the manual reference (1). Like:

See
.IR cat (1) .

> * Added support for another string, perhaps 'MB' ("manref base"?),
>   supplying a base URL which can be set at page-generation time.
>   Embedding a full URL in man pages sources to an inherently relocatable
>   page hierarchy is a bad idea.

For what it's worth, there is no full URL embedded in the sources.
The references are all from other manual pages, so the refs inserted
are just relative links like "../man1/cat.html".

> [2] Actually I'm a little puzzled here--as I read the diff, the .nh
>     request is retained in .IR, rather than being moved to the new .IM).

That was a copy-paste error. I've added the .nh to IM as well.
(It's in all the macros; it wasn't specific to IR.) Thanks!

Best,
Russ