Re: "Design" of our release notes

[Thomas Levine <_%thomaslevine.com@localhost>]

Martin Husemann writes:
> I know nothing about the history involved in this or any options (and I
> think it has ~always been like this), but before preparing our first
> NetBSD 9.0 release candidate I thought I'd bring it up here, maybe there
> is a quick "fix":

Dear Martin,



The file is well enough structured that one could adjust the appearance
substantially by adding new CSS styles between lines 9 and 16. I think
this would be most easily accomplished by piping the results of nbgroff
through something like this.
  
  tmp = $(mktemp)
  cat > $tmp
  sed -n '1,/<style/ p'
  cat our-new-css.css
  sed -n '/</\style/,$ p'
  rm $tmp

If nbgroff has a way of setting a different template for HTML
generation, that would be better, but I did not manage to find
such a feature.



However, I don't think it would be quick to choose the new style.
The current style is almost the default HTML styles, and it matches the
styles everywhere else in the documentation, so a change to the style
would look strange compared to everything else.



I did note that the file contains HTML comments inside of CSS,
indicating perhaps that someone tried to remove the non-default margin
and header styles and entirely use default HTML styles. That section is
short, so I'll copy it here.

        <style type="text/css">
        <!--
                body { margin-left:4%; }
                H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 {
                        color: maroon; padding: 4pt; margin-left: -4%;
                        border: solid; border-width: thin; width: 100%;
                        background: rgb(204,204,255)
                }
        -->
        </style>

This is the only style change I can think of that would indeed be a
quick fix would be to replace these with CSS comments and thus remove
the non-default header format. At that point we could just remove this
whole section. Something like this would work.

  ${TOOL_GROFF} ... | sed '/<style/,/</\style/ d' > $@

But, again, it would be simpler and safer to change this in the original
HTML template, which might be in the source code for nbgroff.



Reviewing this file for the first time, I noted that the syntax is
slightly incorrect. This is separate from the visual appearance you
bring up; the file has a couple of spurious tags that most web browsers
manage to ignore. Even if no style change is to be made, perhaps I will
try to figure out where in the build process those tags are introduced,
and then maybe I will submit a patch finally.



With distinguished salutations,
Thomas