Hi, Branden! On 3/20/22 11:52, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

Sure! The punctuation does get a bit bewildering.

[...] Thanks for the great explanation!

Now, for the part people actually care about, which is how to fix it: take the escape character off of that `.

You thus want

+to "\fI[a\('a\(`a\(:a\(^a]\fP", that is,

I applied a patch with this.

If you wanted to write this without using any aliases, you could adopt groff syntax.

+to "\fI[a\[a aa]\[a ga]\[a ad]\[a a^]\fP", that is,

I'm going to hold this for later, so that we decide globally how to format all pages, and not just this one. I prefer global consistency here.

I don't know if people regard that as more or less impenetrable. It is more _flexible_, and admits usage of diacritics/combining characters not envisioned by AT&T troff or ISO Latin-1. groff supports a baker's dozen. They are in a table titled "Accents" in groff_char(7) (1.22.4).

...

diff --git a/man8/zic.8 b/man8/zic.8 index 940d6e814..aeca0e726 100644 --- a/man8/zic.8 +++ b/man8/zic.8 @@ -293,7 +293,7 @@ nor .q + . To allow for future extensions, an unquoted name should not contain characters from the set -.q !$%&'()*,/:;<=>?@[\e]^`{|}\(ti . +.q !$%&'()*,/:;<=>?@[\e]^\`{|}\(ti .

You didn't proffer any complaints about the foregoing, so I assume it was just for context (to include the whole commit, maybe).

Yep

Nevertheless I think it can be further improved.

That neutral apostrophe and caret/circumflex should be changed as well, to ensure that they don't render as a directional closing (right) single quote, ’ U+2019 and modifier letter circumflex ˆ U+02C6. This advice is also in groff 1.22.4's groff_man(7) page.

+.q !$%&\(aq()*,/:;<=>?@[\e]\(ha\`{|}\(ti .

Moreover, as partly noted in our discussion about double quotes in macro arguments, there were no special characters for the double quote or neutral apostrophe in Unix troff. Since we're not getting 50 years of backward compatibility anyway, for the Linux man-pages project I recommend going ahead and using groff-style escape sequences for these.

+.q !$%&\[aq]()*,/:;<=>?@[\[rs]]\[ha]\`{|}\[ti] .

Are you willing to settle for 30 years of backward compatibility? ;-)

I do :) However, I'm not going to fix this page, according to MAINTAINER_NOTES: $ cat MAINTAINER_NOTES Externally generated pages ========================== A few pages come from external sources. Fixes to the pages should really go to the upstream source. tzfile(5), zdump(8), and zic(8) come from the tz project (https://www.iana.org/time-zones). bpf-helpers(7) is autogenerated from the kernel sources using scripts. See man-pages commit 53666f6c30451cde022f65d35a8d448f5a7132ba for details. So now I wonder why this commit was written in the first place, since it breaks one page, and fixes another that shouldn't be fixed. I CCd the tz mailing list in case they want to fix the upstream page (which I couldn't find, BTW).

In my opinion it is more helpful in dense contexts like this to have the paired delimiters [ ] to demarcate the glyph identifier then to achieve portability to systems that don't support identifiers you need anyway.

Yes, I agree with that.

(I note that `q` is a page-local macro and therefore bad style for portability reasons. That said, I have been _sorely_ tempted to add a `Q` macro for this precise purpose to groff man(7). I have hopes that it would give people something to reach for besides bold and italics for every damn thing.)

Most--I hope all--of the above is discussed comprehensively in the current version of groff_char(7)[2], which I have rewritten completely since groff 1.22.4 and substantially modified even since the last Linux man-pages snapshot at <https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/groff_char.7.html>. I now know the answers to many questions of the form "why the **** is {groff,troff} this way?", and have endeavored to share them. The "History" section is completely new.

Regards, Branden

[1] groff's own man pages are not without sin in this regard. I have cleaned them up a lot since 1.22.4, but a few adventurous stragglers remain that define and use page-local macros pervasively. All are on the long side.

[2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/man/groff_char.7.man

I recommend that for source perusal only; do not try to render it with man-db man(1) or groff 1.22.4, because groff 1.23.0 will be adding a new macro, `MR`, for man page cross references[3] and its own pages have already been ported to use it. (This is where I flagellate myself for not having a groff 1.23.0-rc2 out yet. :( )

[3] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS#n165

I like your references usually containing other references themselves. It's funny :-) Cheers, Alex -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/