Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen%sdaoden.eu@localhost>]

Kamil Rytarowski wrote in
 <12f29556-2407-2f6f-de5c-67539bca6d66%netbsd.org@localhost>:
 |I apologize for nerves and words that could be avoided.
 |
 |I'm going to summarize the situation with formatters in the NetBSD base.
 |
 |1. NetBSD base ships with two programs that can format manual pages from
 |base and most 3rd party software: BSD mandoc (newest) and GPLv2 groff
 |1.19.2 (old, from 2005).

Not much good happened since then on the source side, i would even
go back a bit further.

 |2. mandoc as of today renders correctly 99.8% of manual pages from

I find mandoc formatting terrible when indentation is involved,
really.  It has been like that forever, and i was reading
carefully already at a time where this number was much lower.
For example compare

            ‘*!*’             the error number is tracked in !.
            ‘needs-box’       whether the command needs an active
                              mailbox, a folder.
            ‘ok:’             indicators whether command is ...
                              ‘batch/interactive’
                                                 usable in interactive
                                                 or batch mode (-#).
                              ‘send-mode’        usable in send mode.
                              ‘subprocess’       allowed to be used when
                                                 running in a subprocess
                                                 instance, for example
                                                 from within a macro
                                                 that is called via
                                                 on-compose-splice.

with

     ‘needs-box’  whether the command needs an active mailbox, a
                  folder[199].
     ‘ok:’        indicators whether command is ...
                  ‘batch/interactive’
                                usable in interactive or batch mode
                                (-#[88]).
                  ‘send-mode’   usable in send mode.
                  ‘subprocess’  allowed to be used when running in a
                                subprocess instance, for example from
                                within a macro that is called via
                                on-compose-splice[489].

or

                          (purposes).
         ‘content-description’ Associate
                          some
                          descriptive
                          information
                          to the
                          attachment's
                          content,
                          used in
                          favour of
                          the plain
                          filename by
                          some MUAs.
         ‘content-id’     May be used
                          for uniquely
                          identifying
                          MIME

with

                    for) saving (purposes).
        ‘content-description’ Associate some descriptive
                    information to the attachment's con‐
                    tent, used in favour of the plain
                    filename by some MUAs.
        ‘content-id’ May be used for uniquely identify‐
                    ing MIME entities in several con‐
                    texts; this expects a special refer‐

all moved to the left to fit in this message, but otherwise just
taken the output i get.  I wonder why you (or anyone else) never
recognized these differences.
Technically you are correct, of course.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)