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

[Paul Eggert]

On 2024-03-17 15:20, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

> In case you want to have a quick look at how it looks, here's an example
> from the Linux man-pages:
> 
> <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/share/dist/man-pages/git/HEAD/man-pages-HEAD.pdf#pdf%3Abm12325>

Yes, unfortunately that looks subpar to me. There's too much space 
between the bullets and the text they're bulleting. For example, in the 
last page of man-pages(7) the bullets should be indented with respect to 
the parent text, and there should be less space between the bullets and 
the text. Much better is what tzfile(5) does now (see attached); this is 
particularly important when something is nested under the bullet level, 
as it is in tzfile(5). The current tzfile(5) bulleting approach is 
closer to how Joe Ossanna used bullets in section 7.2 of the Nroff/Troff 
User's Manual (1976)[1], which is what I learned troff from. (Ossanna 
doesn't subindent so his larger indents are not that much of a problem 
in the manual, but tzfile(5) needs to subindent.)

There are other things not to like about the man page PDF output. The 
man pages are confused about when to use constant-width fonts vs 
varying-width fonts. The lines are too long to read comfortably; this is 
inherent to how a good font squeezes in more text. Indents are too large 
in general. The PDF man pages should be formatted for smaller pages, or 
with tons more margin, or two-column, or something. Of course I realize 
we can't fix all this, as there's long tradition of hasty and/or bad 
formatting dating back to 7th Edition Unix man pages. Still, if someone 
wants to make little improvements we should let them.


> Surprising as it may be, Debian's man2html(1) could
> handle (probably by ignoring them; I didn't really check) previous uses
> of \w, but started crashing with \w in IP.  Did you receive a copy of
> the Debian bug report?

I followed up separately to that. In short, that man2html appears to be 
unmaintained upstream and should be retired, but I sent in a patch anyway.


[1]: 
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/C.1.2_NROFF_TROFF_Users_Manual.pdf
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