Re: style: .MR

[Humm]

Quoth G. Branden Robinson:
> > Why not accept an empty second argument and puncuation?
> >
> >         .MR gmtime "" ()
>
> That looks too much like cleverness to me, but I suppose there is a
> certain amount of subjectivity to these things.

Huh, doesn’t look very clever to me.  Sure, subjective.

> > I don’t get why you wouldn’t just use -mdoc and leave -man as it is.
>
> As I said years ago on this list when I embarked on improving man(7)
> (mostly _not_ with new features, but with bug fixes), if mdoc(7) were
> going to eat man(7)'s lunch, it would have happened by now.  It's had 30
> years.

Perhaps I should read that.  I don’t know why people use -man much 
still.  My utopia definitely doesn’t include both, and -mdoc rather than 
-man.

> Further, high-quality dead tree typography is an explicit anti-goal of
> its development.  All mandoc(1) cares about is the terminal and static
> HTML.  groff's overall mission does not permit the abandonment of
> typesetting.

Yes, mandoc.  I don’t think that has anything to do with -mdoc, though.  
We can still set beautiful documents using the same macros.

> > On most systems, there is -mdoc, and on the other ones, there likely
> > won’t be a -man implementing such new macros.
>
> This will be attributable to laziness or hostility, and not due to
> licensing concerns.  Systems still assuming (or imposing) the
> six-argument limit on macro calls will be misrendering many pages
> _today_.  (Hmm, I never did write down that this is a reason to quote
> multi-word (sub)section headings in arguments to `SH` and `SS`.)
>
> > Making cross references links is nice, but I could totally live with
> > not having that at all with -man.
>
> I don't expect many epiphanies--I simply want to deliver a better
> experience for those who are open to it.

Sure.

> > (That doesn’t seem like a better imagination though.)
>
> Just last month I was spending some sweat generating a table of contents
> for the new 380+ compiled groff-man-pages.pdf document--I'd had my face
> in the 1970s Unix manuals recently-- when Deri James emailed me out of
> the blue with a shockingly short patch enabling PDF bookmarks in man(7).
>
> All of a sudden I didn't need to bother.  In any reasonable PDF viewer a
> table of contents is available in tree form, resizable, depth-foldable,
> hyperlinked, and not a page number in sight.  That's improvement.
>
> Granted, we pay a price with several more annoying diagnostics "can't
> output node in transparent throughput!  OMG!".  But at least I finally
> understand that hopelessly inscrutable message.  Enough that I am
> prepared to try to kill Savannah #61407 in the formatter if necessary.
>
> How's that[1] coming, Deri?  :D

I don’t quite understand the context, but yeah, good PDFs are important 
and fun too, including their nice TOC feature.  And if you wanted to put 
the manual in print (or have fun readying it for that without planning 
to actually print it), I don’t think a TOC would be of much importance.  
Personally, I’d much rather see a KWIC permuted index of the NAME 
sections.  (At least some of mentioned Programmer’s Manuals have that 
too.)

--
Humm