Re: Groff macro to make .UR and .UE links clickable in PDF?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Steve,

Steve Izma wrote on Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 11:26:46AM -0400:

> But the question here is how to *display* a URL in text and my
> rule of thumb is to reduce the size of the displayed URL as much
> as possible.

There is nothing wrong with the document author doing that in cases
where it works together with the surrounding text, if and when the
surrounding text provides sufficient context.

But please don't change what the author writes behind the author's
back, and least of all breaking existing documents.

> I think it's an abomination that a man page extends it's line
> length to fit the width of the terminal;

That's exactly why the mandoc implementation of the man(1) program
doesn't do that.  Try it with a very wide virtual terminal window
on an operating system like OpenBSD, Alpine Linux, or Void Linux;
or on Fedora Linux with the "use mandoc as man" configuration option
enabled; or on any other Linux with a mandoc package installed and
enabled as man(1) by hand.  Even if you make the terminal window
200 display columns wide, that man(1) implementation only uses the
first 78 columns of it.  If you make the terminal narrower, that
man(1) implementation does adapt to the narrower width, though.  If
you go below 66 columns, it also reduces indentation to 3 display
columns.

If you want very wide lines, you have to explicit request them with
something like

   $ man -O width=200 man

or by putting a line like "output width 200" into /etc/man.conf.

> built into the macros
> should be a 65- or 70 character maximum width. It's interesting
> that the Python Style Guide insists on a maximum line length of
> 79 characters and recommends 72. A basic premise of python design
> is *readability of code*. The main source of authors for man
> pages is, I assume, programmers.

The main reason of keeping the limit at 78 and not reducing it to,
for example, 70 is that many existing manual pages have been written
to look good with a limit of 78, and displaying them with a smaller
width sometimes causes awkward line breaks.  Not a huge deal, but
then again, 78 isn't that bad for readability either, in particular
given that there is a left margin of five display columns for mdoc(7)
and seven display columns for man(7) by default.

Yours,
  Ingo