Hi Alex,

At 2025-08-06T13:45:46+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

quoted

quoted

Is there any way of knowing how long an identifier can be before it's
necessary to \%-ify it?

TL;DR: five letters.[1]

[...]

quoted

Example:

$ hyphen FSCONFIG_SET_PATH_EMPTY
FS‐CON‐FIG_SET_PATH_EMPTY

While I see the usefulness, I'd find it cumbersome having to ask it
about every identifier I'll be using.

I find myself having to ask relatively seldom.  Most of us can subitize
a word such that we discern whether its more than five letters.  And
erring by prefixing an (automatically) unhyphenable word of any length
does no harm to document correctness or rendering.

A more likely source of error is forgetting what *roff considers a word.

Here's an example that's bitten me.

[snip]
commit 2c5853ec5afbc4d58c320457083aa6eaa9d046e9
Author: G. Branden Robinson [off-list ref]
Date:   Sat Jun 8 04:08:55 2024 -0500

    man/curs_inopts.3x: Fix markup error.

    Use of `\%` as a hyphenation suppressor _must_ come at the beginning of
    a word.

diff --git a/man/curs_inopts.3x b/man/curs_inopts.3x
index b69165d39..77b1777f4 100644
--- a/man/curs_inopts.3x
+++ b/man/curs_inopts.3x

@@ -562,9 +562,9 @@ .SH NOTES
 (\*(``cooked\*('') mode from raw and cbreak modes,
 respectively.
 Mixing
-.BR raw / \%noraw
+.BR \%raw / noraw
 calls with
-.BR cbreak / \%nocbreak
+.BR \%cbreak / nocbreak
 calls leads to terminal driver control states that are hard to predict
 or understand;
 doing so is not recommended.

[end snip]

McIlroy's original man(7) implementation could have been more helpful in
marking code literals.  On the other hand, linkers of the day tended to
restrict your externally visible symbols to six characters at most.

If I went to the Temple of Unix at Murray Hill, New Jersey to petition
the giant enthroned statue of Ken Thompson for divine aid, a booming
voice would laugh and mock the folly of mortals in selecting identifier
names that were longer than five characters in the first place.

That's enough for `creat`, `vflag`, and `swtch`...what more do you need?

:-|

I personally never use it, unless I read the page and find some line
break ugly.  And *never* use it in manual page references (BR), with the
rationale being that we'll eventually replace them with MR, which does
that for us.

I haven't forgotten about my series of sed scripts to rewrite (mainly)
syscalls(2).

	grotty:<standard input>:(<standard input>):9: warning: unrecognized X command 'sgr 0' ignored
	grotty:<standard input>:(<standard input>):9: warning: unrecognized X command 'sgr 0' ignored

(BTW, Branden, why am I seeing those error messages recently?)

Did you change distributions recently?  The messages are an artifact of
a downstream patch to groff to force Teletype-style overstriking.  Over
the past two years, distributors that had it in have been taking it out.

https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/commit/?id=d6fe59c946066adef3e19e75f1e7caffda5a4cd1
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/groff/-/commit/025a63b7e55a24c0a1892045819eef79fdc67873

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/g/groff/groff_1.23.0-9_changelog
  * Adopt upstream's use of SGR escape sequences for man/mdoc (LP: #610609).
    I turned these off for Debian in 2002 because pagers didn't cope well at
    the time, but it's now 21 years later and things have changed; SGR
    escape sequences resolve some ambiguity (see #963490) and are required
    for new features such as clickable hyperlinks.

Regards,
Branden