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

[John Gardner]

> and maybe even a bit dated (though not being a native speaker, i may
> be wrong about the latter).

Title-case isn't dated, but it *is* difficult to enforce consistently when
various style-guides differ in their opinions of what words to capitalise.
In general, articles, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions should be
printed in lowercase (with the exception of principal words; i.e., *"Of Mice
and Men"*). In my experience, very few people get this correct: I often see
"is" (verb) written in lowercase, and "upon" (preposition) in uppercase.
Even worse are those who capitalise *every* word, irrespective of its class.

Personally, I prefer headings to be written in sentence-case, and
title-case limited to *literal* titles: the name of a book, movie, song,
album, etc. Ergo, .SH and .SS are better off sticking to sentence-case, if
just to eliminate the mental overhead of remembering which words to
capitalise and which not to.

On Fri, 31 Jan 2020 at 05:56, Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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
>
>