Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!us.feeder.erje.net!news2.arglkargh.de!newsfeed.fsmpi.rwth-aachen.de!newsfeed.straub-nv.de!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Unknown Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.os.linux.slackware,alt.os.linux.debian Subject: Re: Why don't the engineers just shoot the ballet-dancers? Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2015 09:49:59 +0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 55 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2015 09:49:59 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="39e804c5869e0f76ab3775632a5873ea"; logging-data="14847"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18deZXovNFAmqx85oSR6mBDVruMo5yW2AA=" User-Agent: Pan/0.133 (House of Butterflies) Cancel-Lock: sha1:FHCWaT9NMXrW5PQer7jCQftxRkg= Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:13380 On Wed, 07 Jan 2015 09:19:24 -0500, Dan Espen wrote: > Richard Kettlewell writes: > >> Dan Espen writes: >>> not.socialnetwork@gmail.com writes: >>>> For how many more years are we going to tolerate the burden of >>>> accomodating the whims of the ART students? >>>> >>>> The need to read masses of `man *` which are contaminated by the >>>> NOISE of eg: >>>> "..The default quali- >>>> fier is trace.... >>> >>> Rant makes no sense. >>> >>> You can use any formatter you like for man pages, including troff >>> which is capable of rendering tables with real borders, proportional >>> justified fonts, multiple font sizes, bold, italic, >>> and line drawings. >>> >>> I use Emacs (M-x man), and get nicely formatted, easily searchable >>> pages. >> >> M-x man just uses the troff output, so has the same justification and > > I think you mean nroff output. > Emacs sets $TERM to "dumb". > >> hyphenation issues that the OP was complaining about. He’s not unique: >> some man pages turn it off, for instance those generated by Pod::Man: >> >> .\" For nroff, turn off justification. Always turn off hyphenation; >> it makes .\" way too many mistakes in technical documents. .if n .ad >> l >> .nh >> >> You could probably make this global by modifying /etc/groff/man.local. >> >> Above is based on Debian wheezy. > > Never heard the complaint before. > I suppose the package owner might listen, the current options available > are: > > -rHY=flags Set hyphenation flags. Possible values are 1 to hyphenate > without restrictions, 2 to not hyphenate the last word on > a page, 4 to not hyphenate the last two characters of a > word, and 8 to not hyphenate the first two characters of a > word. These values are additive; the default is 14. No! The default should be PLAIN. For the arty-types who want music, lavender-scent and bouncing-monkeys add extra switches. And to avoid such problems in future, best just shoot the ballet-dancers.