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

[Michael Pirkola]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2020 09:28:45 +0100
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 11:26:46AM -0400, Steve Izma wrote:
> > I think it's an abomination that a man page extends it's line
> > length to fit the width of the terminal; built into the macros
> > should be a 65- or 70 character maximum width.  
> 
> I'd be willing to take a bug report about the way that man-db does
> this by default; it's a change I adopted from Andries Brouwer's man
> way back in 2001, and I'm certainly prepared to entertain the idea
> that a change I made nearly half my life ago might have been wrong.
> (However, I would like it as a bug report on e.g.
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db rather than buried in a
> mailing list thread, because my ability to keep track of random
> threads isn't quite what it used to be.)
> 

While I agree that a shorter line length is more readable, I frequently
exit a manpage, maximise the terminal window, then reopen it when my
goal is to quickly scan the page for a relevant option.  I find argument
lists in particular much easier to look through when they take up fewer
lines.  Manpages in particular are less likely to have large paragraphs
of text, and a long line length commonly reduces an entire topic to a
single line which I also find more convenient.

Just my 2¢.