[CC list brutally trimmed]

At 2021-07-31T13:02:27+0200, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:

I think you misunderstood the context here.

I meant all of that about input, i.e., the text of the patch itself,
text to be added to a man page source text.

What I meant is that when you break lines semantically (when writing a
patch), and initially forget about the 80 (or 75) column right margin,
most of the lines you write will already (as a side effect of breaking
lines semantically) be within the 80 (or 75) right margin.

For those that still don't fit into 80 characters after doing that,
break further (or at some other point that may also break nicely
semantically); otherwise, I won't see the text when editing the man
page on my 80-col terminal.

For those that still don't fit into 75 characters after doing that,
consider breaking further, but only if doing so seems easy and lines
break nicely.  I can still see after line 75, and I can do some effort
to scroll an email a few columns if needed (when many quotes move the
text further to the right).  So if the source code would break in a
weird way because of forcing a 75 col right margin, please ignore that
margin.

I hope I was clear this time.

Quite so.  In my experience with the groff man pages (~60 of them), when
you apply the semantic newline rule to commas, colons, and semicolons as
well as sentence-ending punctuation, text lines that exceed 72 columns
are fairly rare.  (I also set multi-word parentheticals on their own
input lines.)

As I've noted elsewhere (in the "intro" PDF I shared the other day,
though I don't think the document made it to the linux-man@
list--filtered, I suspect), if you find yourself crashing past 72
columns when using semantic newlines with ordinary prose, there's a good
chance you need to recast for readability.

From what I've seen, the hardest line length problems the Linux
man-pages project deals with are in non-prose contexts; function
synopses and similar.

BTW, thanks for your mail.  It wasn't related to what I meant, but was
interesting :=)

Thank you.  That mitigates my chagrin at talking past the point.  :)

Regards,
Branden