Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] Re: user-manual: general improvements

Felipe Contreras venit, vidit, dixit 21.05.2009 17:57:

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Michael J Gruber
[off-list ref] wrote:

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Felipe Contreras venit, vidit, dixit 21.05.2009 09:17:

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On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 06:33:36PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

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http://people.freedesktop.org/~felipec/git/user-manual-general-improvements/

Thank you very much Felipe to take the time to upload the patches there.
I already have a copy there and I'll look at it soon.

Has anybody looked at this?  It's a bit large-ish and touches all over the
place, so I am finding it a bit hard to concentrate on it myself really
nitpicking, but from the cursory look after formatting the result looked
Ok.

I started to, but the first commit message is lacking something that I
think would make reviewing much simpler: what are the general classes of
changes that are being made?

I see some doublequotes becoming backticks, and some becoming single
quotes. And some becoming tex-quotes (``...''), and even some becoming
doublequotes _with_ single quotes. It would be easier to verify that
they are doing the right thing if the commit message briefly described
the rules it followed for changing each one. I think they are something
like:

 - tex-quotes if it was really a prose-style quotation

 - backticks (causing monospace) for branch names, commands, etc in
   prose

but that leaves me confused. Some things which I thought should be in
monospace backticks are in single-quotes (causing emphasis). Like
'master' or 'linux-2.6'. And some things are emphasized and in double
quotes in the prose, like '"o"' or '"branch A"'. What is the rule to
decide which text should have visible doublequotes but also be
emphasized, as opposed to just having double-quotes or just being
emphasized?

Maybe this was even discussed earlier in the thread (I didn't go back to
look), but it should definitely be part of the commit message.

The rule I followed is: change it to whatever looks best.

I followed some guidelines such as: make common text monospace, such
as gitk and master. And emphasize whatever needs emphasizing, such as
fb47ddb2db. Examples are both monospace *and* emphasized.

Sometimes the end result still didn't look good so I just used
whatever looked best.

I think that's a bit of a "quick and dirty" approach. Man pages and user
manual should use semantic markup. The matter of "looks" is up to the
documentation tool chain, i.e. the style sheets etc. for the various
backends.

So we would need:

- a documentation "style guide" which tells you how to do the semantic
markup, such as `cmd` for commands, 'foo' for emphasis etc.

- maybe some changes to the style sheets etc. which make the semantic
markup "look good"

The standard transformations which come with asciidoc/docbook can serve
as a guide.

There's already a guide: the asciidoc user-guide... you can only go as
far as asciidoc lets you. `` for monospace, '' for emphasis, ``'' for
double quotes.

I am sorry but I don't think you fully comprehend the documentation tool
chain. Asciidoc translates the *.txt according to config files which
come with asciidoc and can be (and are, in our case) modified. It
translates into xml (for man pages) which is semantic markup. Even at
that step, there are more options - the standard asciidoc.conf (asciidoc
8) has:

[quotes]
# Constrained quotes.
*=strong
'=emphasis
`=monospaced
``|''=quoted
ifdef::asciidoc7compatible[]
\##=unquoted
endif::asciidoc7compatible[]
ifndef::asciidoc7compatible[]
\#=unquoted
_=emphasis
+=monospaced
# Unconstrained quotes.
**=#strong
__=#emphasis
++=#monospaced
\##=#unquoted
^=#superscript
~=#subscript
endif::asciidoc7compatible[]

So, you see we could use quite a few more quote designators if we wished
to. We only needed ' and _ to be different, for example.

Backend specific config files determine what "emphasis" is translated
into: an <emphasis> tag for docbook-xml, an <em> tag (with attributes)
for xhtml.

Then, for man page format, docbook style sheets are applied (using
xsltproc or such) to the xml files. The final appearance is determined
by those sheets. (For html, it's merely css applied by the browser.)

The asciidoc manual really only explains example usage with the default,
unmodified config files.

I have a problem with clear-cut rules such as: `cmd` for commands.

Do you think all these are the same?
The `git clone` command allows you to...
You can do that by doing '"git commit -a -m Example"'
Please refer to linkgit:git-add[1]

If you are reading the text you'll see that the 3 usages have different intents.

Yes, which is why I said "for example", and why a guide needs some
thinking. Or I would have come up with one...

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Have you actually looked at the end result?

No. My attempts at doing systematic changes (rather than modifying
single pages without a clear target) have failed, so I've been keeping
out of this business...

It's one click away:
http://people.freedesktop.org/~felipec/git/user-manual/user-manual.html

I guess you completely misunderstood my remark (and I may very well be
the one to blame for that), and it doesn't matter in the context of this
thread. I have no problems formatting the user-manual, thanks to the
recent addition of ASCIIDOC_NO_ROFF ;)

Michael