Re: an.tmac, .TH: shows the same text twice in the header! Why necessary?

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2023 22 Jul 14:22 -0500, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
>   The text "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" is output twice in the header,
> is once not enough and why?  (Is this necessary(?))

On a terminal or PDF form read on a monitor, once is certainly enough.

My limited understanding of manual pages is that the format was the
result of the intent of binding the man output into a printed manual.
As each page likely would be rendered independently before binding, it
seems probable that the thought was to have the command name next to
each margin so that those thumbing through the printed manual could
easily find the command they were looking for.  This seems to make sense
as each page could begin on either the front of back side of a sheet of
paper in the bound manual.

Consistency is probably the only reason the convention was carried over
to video display terminals.  Also, commands back then were short--5 or 6
characters at most.  Something like "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" was
almost certainly not anticipated at the inception of man pages.

Why it has carried forward all of these years can likely be attributed
to double headings often not being a problem and due to a lot of care
for backward compatibility in the Free Software projects since their
inception.  Fortunately, old tools like *roff are getting some fresh
looks and the compatibility with historic systems is now being
questioned to an extent.  Compatibility with older Unix and older
conventions in the Linux world is likely not as high of a priority as it
once was although I am impressed that Branden takes care to test Groff
against old documents.  Certainly this convention and the forced upper
casing of commands in the heading can be revisited by developers,
distributors, and users.

- Nate

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