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Re: All caps .TH page title


From: Douglas McIlroy
Subject: Re: All caps .TH page title
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2022 07:36:03 -0400

Changing the .TH case convention throughout the Unix world is about as
futile an effort as English spelling reform. Doing it for
groff-related man pages only would simply brand groff as quirky.

At least the current convention has the virtue of simplicity. A
convention of matching the case of commands or functions needs extra
rules to settle how to render titles like INTRO(1), EXEC(3),
STRING(3), or various stuff in man7.

As for the history, Dennis's original man-page template was generally
deemed worthy. The only discussions I remember were about the overall
division into sections and how to organize pages within a section. The
overall division turned out to be a little squishy, witness the
aimless evolution of the remits of sections 5-7. I am happy to note
that the organization within section--intro  plus alphabetic--has held
firm. (My most substantive contribution to the v1 manual was holding
out for alphabetization versus a topical outline. My main talking
point was the inutility of topical organization in the 15th edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Doug



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