Re: [Groff] Critique this bold-italic private macro for man pages

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi jkl,

> Carsten Kunze wrote:
> > There are ways to detect the formatter but a manpage must not do
> > this.  
>
> Why not?  ISTM we'd have better manpages if they weren't constrained
> to the rendering capability of a VT-100 terminal.   For example,
> equations or pictures could augment the text, or replace some of it,
> when "printed".  

`.if n' and `.if t' are OK since they're available everywhere.  And man
pages may already use eqn(1), etc., if they want.  man(7) mentions the
first line being `\" p' to indicate pic(1) is required, for example.

It's up to those preprocessors to produce output that will have a go at
a good representation given the limitations, and for the author not to
strain them and to keep the alternatives on a par.

    $ p="`printf '%s\n' .PS down box line box right \
    >     'move to last box.e' line line box .PE`"
    $ nroff -p <<<"$p" | uniq
    ┌──────┐
    │      │
    └───┬──┘
        │
    ┌───┴──┐          ┌──────┐
    │      ├──────────│      │
    │      │          │      │
    └──────┘          └──────┘

    $ nroff -p -Tascii <<<"$p" | uniq
    +------+
    |      |
    +---+--+
        |
    +---+--+          +------+
    |      +----------|      |
    |      |          |      |
    +------+          +------+

    $

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy