Re: Terminal problem? man formatting problem?

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Oliver,

At 2023-04-23T12:23:06+0200, Oliver Corff wrote:
> I came across a minor case of misbehaviour when trying to open html
> links in man pages.
> 
> $ man 7 roff
> 
> has a section "SEE ALSO" with a number of links to Internet sites.
> 
> The first link under "History of Unix Manpages"
> ⟨http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html⟩ is ready for opening in the
> browser once the mouse hovers over it but cannot be opened (404 file not
> found) because the closing parenthesis ")" erroneously makes its way
> into the link. See also the automated highlighting (on my terminal via
> underlining). The underlined region includes the closing parenthesis
> (but not the opening parenthesis).
> 
> However, the next link (http://www.troff.org) is activated correctly.
> 
> It seems to be that URLs ending in top-level domains are recognized
> correctly whereas URS with a page element (.../history.html in the first
> example) are not recognized correctly.
> 
> Is this an issue of the terminal (I use lxterminal 0.4.0) of of the
> formatting process chain?

It can be.

> The manpage source code is structurally identical in both cases:
> 
> .\" on-screen URL highlighting includes closing parenthesis, Ctrl+Left
> Click produces wrong URL (closing with ")")
> .UR http://\:manpages.bsd.lv/\:history.html
> 
> .\" on-screen URL highlighting does not include closing parenthesis,
> Ctrl+Left Click produces correct URL
> .UR http://\:www.troff.org

That these hyperlink differently (with respect to trailing punctuation,
apart from the obvious difference in URL content) suggests a problem
with the terminal emulator...

> PS: This machine runs groff 1.22.4,

...and that clinches it.  groff 1.22.4 did not attempt to tell the
terminal emulator about hyperlinks; the emulator is inferring them, and
getting it wrong.  (Not a surprise--it is an AI-hard problem to guess
correctly.)

> please forgive me if this is already fixed in the upcoming 1.23.0
> release.

I _hope_ that it is avoided, and that lxterminal does not try to
pattern-match URLs in the terminal window when the character cells it
would auto-hyperlink are already covered by an active OSC 8 escape
sequence, but I can't promise that any given terminal emulator isn't
buggy.

This bug might be worth reporting to the lxterminal developers for the
sake of people not yet using groff 1.23.0.  There'll be a few, since we
haven't yet officially released.

Regards,
Branden

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