Hi astian, > Date: 2026-09-17 07:04:37+0000 > From: astian > > On 14 Sep 2026 14:56 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > [...] > >> Which bring up the question, why not moving to a less hairy source > >> format? > > > > This question comes up every now and then. TL;DR: other formats are > > worse. > > > > man(7) is pretty simple, and easy to learn exactly by editing words > > blindly. There are very few macros, and their behavior is trivial once > > you use them a few times. > > > > One thing that is very important is that we use semantic newlines. > > That discards .md and .rst, since they are meant to be written with > > paragraphs as they'd be read by humans. > > Sorry, I didn't read groff_man fully, but I'm curious: what is the > meaning of newlines in man that gets lost in those other formats? They have no meaning. > Looking at some source pages now and it seems most newlines are about as > (non) meaningful as in those formats (i.e., the paragraph is reflowed > during rendering). I don't know how you read .md or .rst, but I read them in the terminal, usually with less(1), which doesn't reflow them. Is there any program for reading these in the terminal reflowed? > > mdoc(7) is more complex than > > man(7), and thus we don't want that. There are other formats, also > > inappropriate, for the same or other reasons. > > > > A summary that will serve for 95%+ of the text written in manual pages: > > > > .SH section heading > > .SS sub section > > .B bold > > .I italics > > > > Alternating per word (spaces removed): > > .BI bold italics > > .IB italics bold > > .BR bold roman > > .RB roman bold > > .IR italics roman > > .RI roman italics > > (roman means normal) > > > > paragraph separator: > > .P > > Indented paragraph: > > .IP > > Tagged paragraph: > > .TP > > tag > > > > Examples: > > .EX > > this is an example (monospace, no fill) > > .EE > > Thanks for the synopsis. You're welcome! Have a lovely day! Alex --