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Re: Raw colored ASCII/UTF art for manpages


From: Lennart Jablonka
Subject: Re: Raw colored ASCII/UTF art for manpages
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 17:48:26 +0000

Quoth aackmann:
It would be very nice to add raw ASCII/UTF art to manpages. That would
make manpages very expressive, as package maintainers will be able to
add ASCII/UTF diagrams and/or art. Imagine your manpage showing you a
colored text chart, logo, and what not. Groff would add \e[0m to
beginning and end of every line, so the styles defined in such raw
input have no interference with surrounding manpage text. This feature
is similar to adding jpeg images to html pages that previously just
displayed text. Perhaps the only requirement from the user would be
that such image fits in a nice rectangular shape, the character height
and width of which is perhaps provided by them.

I disagree, but apart from that, there’s nothing stopping you from doing just that today with your man pages. Get your fixed-width type face with .EX or whatever and play with groff’s color stuff. grotty is capable of emitting SGR escape sequences for colors.

I also want to point at pic, which allows you to draw diagrams if your device supports line drawing stuff, and at the primitive line drawing capability of grotty.



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