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bug#5566: 23.1.92; man page header ugly on narrow terminals
From: |
Juri Linkov |
Subject: |
bug#5566: 23.1.92; man page header ugly on narrow terminals |
Date: |
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:24:16 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.92 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) |
>> Looks indeed ugly, but I fail to see what the
>> libwww-facebook-api-perl package could do about it?!
>
> Likewise, I agree that it's ugly, but I'm not convinced that man-db (or
> groff, which is what's really responsible here) can do anything about
> it. If the header line just plain doesn't fit, it doesn't fit.
>
> No doubt it would be possible to fix this by extending the .TH macro to
> be able to declare some kind of fallback for use when the page width is
> too short for the normal display, but, aside from the fact that I have
> no idea where to start (this would be a groff upstream kind of thing),
> I'm not sure that the substantial effort involved is worth it. I'm sure
> it doesn't actually cause any significant confusion.
>
> Regarding emacs' odd ^H display, which I think is the meat of Dan's bug
> report, this would appear to be essentially a bug in emacs. grotty is
> rendering the just-won't-fit text by way of backspacing over the first
> part of the header and overstriking the middle part; it's within its
> rights to do that. I assume that whatever (lack of) terminal emulation
> is used by M-x man isn't smart enough to handle this; perhaps it
> special-cases the overstriking used for bold and underlining, and can't
> cope with overstriking one character over a completely different
> character?
I think this is not an Emacs bug. I can reproduce it in xterm.
When xterm is narrowed to the 50-character width, running the shell
command `man HTML::TokeParser::Simple::Token::ProcessInstruction`
displays garbage like
^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHTML::TokeParser::Simple::Token::ProcessInstruction(3pm)ion(3pm)
where some random letters are highlighted in bold (where the character
before ^H coincide with the character after ^H).
What we can do in Emacs is simply to remove all ^H but we can't do the
broken header line more readable.
--
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/