[tz] [man]: Bullet lists

Alejandro Colomar alx at kernel.org
Wed Oct 18 11:16:45 UTC 2023


Hi Paul,

I have a small suggestion for formatting of manual pages.  Recently, I
made lists uniform in the Linux man-pages project, and set some rules
for them.  See man-pages(7):

   Lists
       There are different kinds of lists:

       ...

       Bullet lists
              Elements  are preceded by bullet symbols (\[bu]).  Anything that
              doesn’t fit elsewhere is usually covered by this type of list.

       ...

       There should always be exactly 2 spaces between the list symbol and the
       elements.  This doesn’t apply to "tagged paragraphs", which use the de‐
       fault indentation rules.

I guess using '\[bu]' (or '\(bu') might not be appropriate for the tz
project, as it may be less portable to old systems, but the 2 spaces
between the bullet (the '*' in your case) and the text would be useful.
It better distinguishes text from bullets, in the few cases where it may
be ambiguous (I didn't check if any may be ambiguous in the tz project).

The change would be to use '.IP * 3' instead of '.IP * 2'.  3 is for the
width of '*' +2.  Would you be interested in such a change?

Thanks,
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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