Re: tbl(1) minor issues

[Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)]

[Sending to the list, now that I have access to a computer.
I also added a bit more to it.]

Hi Branden!

On 7/23/22 04:50, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Thank you; I appreciate the review.  Yours is the first it's gotten
> since I rewrote it.
>
> > [
> >         spaces,  or  tabs.   (AT&T tbl accepted only options with
> >         all characters in the same lettercase.)   Some  of  these
> > ]
> >
> > since the parenthesized sentence refers to the sentence previous to
> > it, I'd put it as part of it (notice the placement of periods):
> >
> > [
> >         spaces,  or  tabs   (AT&T tbl accepted only options with
> >         all characters in the same lettercase).   Some  of  these
> > ]
>
> I disagree with this, because I find it awkward to put one complete
> sentence as a parenthetical inside another.  I believe a sentence should
> remain grammatical even if the parentheses are removed.  I admit to some
> severity on this point, but all too often as a reader, I find amateur
> technical writers employing punctuation as an excuse to discard the
> rules of standard grammar.  That is not what punctuation is for.

I guess it's standard practice in English...  In Spanish it's extremely 
uncommon to see parenthetical full sentences not attached to another 
one.  In English I've seen it a lot; especially in mtk's text (that's 
when I realized those existed, actually).

I searched in the Spanish dictionary, and there's not much of relevance. 
 Only a rule that I agreed with Michael that it's bad: in Spanish, if 
you insist to use a separate parenthetical as you did, the period goes 
after the closing parenthesis (so you can't blindly remove parentheses 
and their content; you need to check if there's spurious punctuation). 
See <https://www.rae.es/dpd/par%C3%A9ntesis> if you understand Spanish.

More interesting is a link found in that page, documenting the "raya" 
(em dash).  It documents that in Spanish, em dashes are single-side 
spaced: <https://www.rae.es/dpd/raya>.  And also interestingly --and 
this is something that also got me mad with English texts--, Spanish em 
dashes are written in both sides even if one of them is next to 
punctuation --in which case it loses the space, of course--.  The 
Spanish rules for em dashes are much nicer IMO :-)

And the Spanish rules also indicate that the level of isolation from the 
main text is, from more isolation to less isolation: em dash, commas, 
parentheses.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/