On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:34:28 +0200 Christoph Anton Mitterer
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, 2014-06-16 at 06:43 +1000, NeilBrown wrote: 

quoted

tbl I can live with.  Unicode I cannot.
In some contexts Unicode may be ok (non-English words) but not for
line-drawing characters and not for special punctuation.

Well but you know, that tbl(1) won't work for your PDF/HTML rendering
either? At least it didn't when I checked it.

True, it won't work for some renderers.  That is unfortunate but I am willing
to make some sacrifices I guess.

 man -l -Thtml md.4 > md.html

creates some HTML and some png files which look readable in a browser,
including the tables.

Anyway... I guess there's no benefit in discussing over Unicode/tbl
here... :)


I've attached a new set of patches... the second replaces all the
unicode stuff with similar ASCII chars.
I'd suggest to merge both and not just the result of them, so we have
the fancy Unicode stuff in git as well, should we ever decide to upgrade
to post 1991 ;-)

Thanks for being accommodating of my irrational preferences.

Hope that helps and you can merge them largely as is,... please tell me
whether or not (or whether other tweaks are needed)... so that I can
clean up that branch.

I've merged all your patches together and made a few little modification of
my own - nothing major.
I changed the Makefile to use "man -l filename" as that seems to be the
"right" thing to do, rather than "nroff -man".  So tbl is handled correctly.

I've added a separate patch with the biggest change I made which was to
replace "Device" with "Dev" in the 5-device arrays so that that table fits in
the width of a (standard, old fashioned, 72 column) page.

Still have another branch with information you gave me back then, about
how reads and writes are done... I'll come up with that in another mail.

Should I just pull your description-of-reads-and-writes branch (and impose my
style requirements on it)?

Thanks for your efforts and persistence!!

NeilBrown