Re: Right margin for code (SYNOPSIS, EXAMPLES, ...)

["Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Branden,

Thanks :)

I'll use 78 from now on, then.

Cheers,

Alex

On 12/20/20 9:57 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> At 2020-12-12T19:01:30+0100, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
>> On 12/11/20 10:26 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>> Hi Alex,
>>>
>>> On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 22:14, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
>>> <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Michael,
>>>>
>>>> For code, for example function prototypes in SYNOPSIS, do you have a
>>>> preferred right margin? 80? 72?
>>>
>>> If I understand your question, 80. But what prompts you to ask?
> 
> I researched the question of right margin/line length for a change I
> made to groff earlier this year, and my findings were that you should
> format man pages for 78 columns; this will probably work practically
> everywhere.  Things other than tbl(1) tables will work okay at widths
> even narrow than this.
> 
> Why 78 and not 80?  I couldn't find an authoritative answer, but my
> guess is that 80 was viewed as too risky for terminals that would
> misbehave with respect to wrapping or scrolling when a write was done to
> the last cell on the line or screen.  That gets us down to 79, and
> perhaps a preference for even numbers over odd ones explains 78.
> 
> Quoting my own research:
> 
> "...man-db man(1) has supported the LL register for eighteen years, and
> Brouwer/Lucifredi man(1) for fifteen.  Heirloom Doctools's man macros
> set the line length to 78n on nroff devices unconditionally.  mandoc(1)
> similarly also always formats for 78 columns on terminals.  groff's
> mdoc(7) macros grew support for LL in parallel with man(7) in 2002 and
> never added the \n[.l] introspection at all."[1]
> 
> Regards,
> Branden
> 
> [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=7770e10fa4d5b903b6923f466154c806c44de35a
> 

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