[CC += Ingo]

Hi Branden,

On Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 06:45:31PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/an.tmac?h=1.23.0#n162

Hmmm.  What would be affected by changing that default?  Does it affect
anything other than a literal tab in source code?  I presume it doesn't
affect .IP or .RS, and it shouldn't affect tbl(7), so it would be
quite harmless to define that to a different value.

Considering that the BSDs are 8-col tabs people too, I suspect Ingo
won't be too much attached to that default.  Especially, since few
people already use tabs in their manual pages.

And even if the default doesn't change, I can just point to people to
the reason why they see 5-col indents in their manuals, so they can
tweak it if they are too irritated by it (most likely to poke their
packager to tweak it for them).

quoted

Why am I not seeing 8-char indents?

Because the package redefines the tab stops.

This rears the head of the portability beast a bit higher.

Famous Original Doug's man(7) in Seventh Edition Unix also set the tab
stops at every half-inch.

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an

So does Heirloom Doctools.  So does mandoc(1).

Hmmm.

Neatroff doesn't ship its own man(7) implementation, and Plan 9 and
Solaris 10 troffs, and whatever other System V troffs still exist,
I'll wager have no relevance to the Linux man-pages project.

No, they don't have much.

This half-inch tab stop default would seem to foreclose the possibility
of using hard tabs for code examples in your man page sources, unless
you want to depart from Ingo's and my man(7) portability advice
regarding the use of formatter requests.

Well, I'm not too uncomfortable indenting by 5 spaces, if that's the
default.  Then it's up to each one to reconsider the defaults.  :-)


Have a lovely day!
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>