Re: No 6.05/.01 pdf book available

[Deri <deri@chuzzlewit.myzen.co.uk>]

On Saturday, 12 August 2023 18:02:24 BST Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2023-08-07 17:14, Deri wrote:
> > On Monday, 7 August 2023 09:45:22 BST Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> >> Nevertheless, now I remember Deri told me he hardcoded a lot of stuff
> >> for 1.22.4 which should be removed after the release of 1.23.0, so it
> >> seems that the time has come to chop a lot of stuff from there.
> >> 
> >> Deri, would you mind simplifying the scripts assuming a Build-dep of
> >> groff(>=1.23.0)?
> > 
> > Hi Alex, Brian,
> > 
> > I have done some work on building the pdf. One improvement is any warnings
> > output by groff, i.e. use of the deprecated .PDF macro, now identify the
> > particular man page and line number accurately.
> > 
> > I have attached two new replacement LinuxManBook directories. The first,
> > 1.23.0, will run on a stock groff 1.23.0 system. The second, 1.23.0+, runs
> > with the latest gropdf which has a number of advantages for this project -
> > you will find the resulting pdf to be more than 5mb smaller, and the page
> > numbers in the overview pane match up with the page number at the bottom
> > of each page.
> > 
> > The file NewGropdf.pdf contains description of some of the features in the
> > new gropdf.
> > 
> > Both of these should continue to work if the groff version changes, thanks
> > to Brian's helpful suggestion to include /usr/share/groff/current in the
> > font path, but I have achieved this by specifying it in an -F flag rather
> > than patching gropdf.
> 
> Nice work Deri!
> 
> The official 6.05.01 book hyphenates words across page breaks more than
> standard 1.23.0 and new 1.23.0+ gropdf books.

Hi Brian,

I'd like to investigate this to understand why this is happening, please can 
you give me example page numbers which illustrate this.

> File sizes are official 6.05.01 ~13.3MB, 200k more than standard 1.23.0
> ~13MB, which is >~5MB more than new 1.23.0+ gropdf <~8MB.
> 
> I now see page footers on all pages!
> 
> I noticed that new 1.23.0+ seems to set some lines, especially tables, a
> little tighter (perhaps because of space handling), but *only* the first
> page "intro(1)" has half the normal spacing from the page header to the
> first heading!

Yes, I can see the difference in intro(1) and I can see a bug in the version 
of an.tmac I provided which may affect hyphenation. Also a page number example 
of the tighter table would be helpful.

> [I also noticed that *poppler* `pdf2text -layout` (used to diff the content
> amd layout) prints the .SH NAME and options dashes as en-dash from the
> official 6.05.01 book, but prints minus from standard 1.23.0 and new
> 1.23.0+ gropdf.]

This is intentional (and probably desirable). The pdf has a mapping so that 
the groff character \- is displayed as HYPHEN (U+0201) but when text is copy/
pasted from the pdf it is converted to HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D) which is the 
character you get when you hit hyphen on the keyboard. This means that if you 
are copy/pasteing from examples in the man page which includes hyphens then 
your shell will interpret it correctly.

> I notice a number of widows and orphans, but that may be the man macros or
> groff commands not checking for sufficient space left on the page before
> rendering text: allowing 4em before heading spacing, 3em before para
> spacing would probably help, at the cost of larger bottom margins; and
> groff footers need to allow extra space to prevent widows by allowing them
> to intrude.

This probably needs a bit of tender curation! Bear in mind that the 
BuildLinuxMan.pl script uses the flags "-dpaper=a4 -P-pa4" so if the man page 
author has designed for a different page size the widows/orphans may well be 
different.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers

Deri