[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[bug #57618] man/groff_char.7.man: page needs an overhaul
From: |
G. Branden Robinson |
Subject: |
[bug #57618] man/groff_char.7.man: page needs an overhaul |
Date: |
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 04:08:31 -0500 (EST) |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0 PureBrowser/60.9.0 |
Update of bug #57618 (project groff):
Status: None => Confirmed
Assigned to: None => gbranden
Summary: man/groff_char.7.man: meaning of "[sic]" is unclear
=> man/groff_char.7.man: page needs an overhaul
_______________________________________________________
Follow-up Comment #1:
commit 9fd6d7b45d9bb19c9bc3348cbe703c64a662b020
Author: G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden>
Date: Thu Jan 16 17:14:49 2020 +1100
groff_char(7): Fix typos in glyph descriptions.
...and a bogus "sic". A "guillemet" is in fact a kind of quotation
mark. Adobe got it wrong with "guillemot", which is a seabird.
I already got rid of the 4 "sic"s.
But the page still has much that ails it, as you note.
* The stuff in the first paragraph about "(N/A)" for unavailable glyphs is a
lie, as far as I can tell.
* As you note, the tables are often too wide. It would be nice to get them
fitting on an 80-column terminal. This often means getting them to fit on a
U.S. letter page when typeset, too, so it's a good norm to observe.
* Way too much emphasis on Latin-1. We use preconv now. IMO groff input
should be pure ASCII plus groff escapes, but preconv gives us more flexibility
than that.
* In fact I'd nuke the Latin-1 section altogether. It's an old, uninteresting
encoding, and people had switched away to ISO 8859-15 even before they went to
full-on UTF-8, because they needed the Euro sign.
* Lots of Bernd-isms in this page, like repeatedly putting noun phrases in
italics.
I'd have fixed this page long ago if it didn't require so _much_ work.
But fixing the irritating typos was a start.
There is a theory that the [sic] was not for the guillemot/met spelling, but
due to the problematic terminology of "left" and "right", because these glyphs
are supposed to mirror-reflect when used in RTL languages. So I guess
"forward" (in the direction of text flow) and "backward" are about the only
terms we can use.
But does groff even support RTL languages at all? As far as I know it does
not, and this left/right is not worth fixing, in my view, until and unless it
does.
I am therefore, instead of closing this bug, adapting it to my own foul
purposes. The laundry list of things I think it needs is above.
Comments are welcome on my proposed actions.
_______________________________________________________
Reply to this item at:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57618>
_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/