Re: [groff] 02/07: **/*.man: Put subsection heads in sentence case.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 04:00:59AM -0500:

> commit a24aed3ddfe965d14c651c3ee368273fafaa25d6
> Author: G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden>
> AuthorDate: Sat Jan 25 03:55:42 2020 +1100
> 
>     **/*.man: Put subsection heads in sentence case.
>     ...where they are not already.

Thanks.

>     Section headings (.SH) get title case ("See Spot Run"); subsection
>     headings (.SS) get sentence case ("See spot run").
>     
>     This was one of the uncontroversial points from a December 2018
>     discussion among the developers about the casing of such things and my
>     proposal to stop force-full-capitalizing them in man page sources; see
>     https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2018-12/msg00141.html and
>     follow-ups.

I just re-read the entire thread, but failed to find any suggestion
that .SH and .SS should follow *different* conventions.
Xan you provide a more specific reference?

In fact, i'd prefer .SH to also use sentence case, just like .SS.
Even though German does even more capitalization of words in the
middle of sentences than English, i feel that Title Case Looks Ugly,
and maybe even a bit dated (though not being a native speaker, i may
be wrong about the latter).  For example, the Times, the Guardian,
the Washington Post, and the Australian all use sentence case for
headlines, though of course title case also exists, for example
in the New York Times.

Either way, while having two different conventions certainly makes
following them consistently harder for manual page authors, it doubt
that it makes the output more visually pleasing or easier to read.

>     Also double-quote multi-word subsection titles, effectively
>     making them one macro argument.

We disagree about that, but that's not the end of the world.
In tend to think case matters more than quoting.

Yours,
  Ingo