Re: [PATCH v2] tzfile.5: Fix indentation

[G. Branden Robinson]

[looping in groff list because I started talking about my plans again]

Hi Paul,

At 2024-03-17T15:07:49-0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2024-03-17 12:06, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Can I ask how the existing system of measurement units in *roff is
> > unsatisfactory for your application?
> 
> Previously, tzfile.5 used only directives like ".IP *", ".IP * 2",
> ".RS", and ".RE" to control indenting. But after Alex suggested here:
> 
> https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-October/033116.html
> 
> that we switch to ".IP * 3",

Ah.  Hmm.  I would not have made that suggestion, myself.  For bullets
and list enumerators, I find the robotic enforcement of a 2n separation
between the paragraph marker and its content to be unnecessarily
prescriptive.  Consequently, groff 1.24 will no longer do so for `IP`
paragraphs.  (Rather, the minimum separation it enforces will be zero;
it will permit abutment but not overlapping.)  I think a lot depends on
the sigil one chooses for a paragraph marker, which could be anything in
Unicode, and of course on personal taste.

(I wanted to maintain separation enforcement for the `TP` because
paragraph tags are so often words or phrases.  I have longer-term plans
to perform automatic "tagging" (in the hyperlink sense) of paragraph
tags, to facilitate improved navigation and search features in the
man(7) applications.)

> I noticed that the resulting PDF output had too much white space
> around the "*", even though the nroff output looked sorta OK. (The
> problem had already been present with "2", but it got worse with "3".)
> The problem got even a bit worse if I used "\(bu" instead of "*". So
> the patch I installed computed widths with \w instead. See:
> 
> https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-October/058168.html

Well, I won't tell you not to use, say, "IP \(bu 1" if you like it.  ;-)

> Yes, if users don't care about PDF or varying-width HTML output
> there's no point to using \w here.

If _you_ care about formatting man pages in PDF, you might be interested
in some things I've recently landed in groff Git.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-01/msg00125.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-03/msg00139.html

> The TZDB man pages already used \w for other things (lining up code
> and tables). Although a man page formatter that can't handle \w may be
> out of luck with \w in .IP directives, they were out of luck already.

This sounds perfectly reasonable.  Thanks for helping me to understand
your use case.

Regards,
Branden

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