Re: [Groff] Choosing a portability target

[walter harms]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> walter harms <address@hidden>:
>> Stuff like tbl,eqn,... is discouraged (somebody mentioned it before) to keep
>> thinks simple.
> 
> Discouraging TBL is the wrong advice to give nowadays.  It used to make sense,
> back before the .\" t convention evolved and when most-third-party viewers
> would just ignore .TS/.TE, but the background has changed.
> 
> Today I would say "Do use TBL for tables, do *not* make ad-hoc ones using 
> ,ta, because structured TBL is easier for downstream viewers to parse
> unambiguously."
> 

i am a big fan of tables (for a different reason) but we can not change that
if the (man page) maintainers do not enforce it. someone should contact them
and perhaps they have some nice additional ideas that should be incorporated.

It would be a nice step forward to add stuff like pic into man pages aka
'a picture says more that 1000 words' (think of flow charts)

re,
 wh



> (doclifter handles both TBL and ad-hoc tables, so if it weren't for 
> the viewer-portability issue I would not care about this.)