One can observe the following problems when generating or viewing plain
text versions of the Guidebook. (There are three; "Guidebook" and
"Guidebook.txt" are identical, and are paginated; "Guidebook.dat" is not
paginated.)
1. The line "(Edited and expanded for NetHack 3.7.0 by Mike Stephenson
and others)" is overset.
2. So are Figures 1 and 2, by one character cell, when rendered with
groff 1.23.0 because of the way it handles boxed tables and those
with vertical rules at table boundaries.
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=8f066786ea3cb5e1dbade1149e7d50ae978da202
3. When viewing the Guidebook in an 80-column terminal, the left and
right margins are asymmetric; you get 10 columns on the left but
only 5 on the right.
So:
* doc/Guidebook.mn: In nroff mode, set page offset to 5n and increase
line and title line lengths by 5n to 70n.
Now, the margins are symmetric, there's ample room for the figures, and
the expansion credit fits.
(One diagnostic remains when formatting with groff 1.23.0.
troff:tmac.n:762: error: cannot load font 'S' for emboldening
This is a groff bug and will be fixed in the next release. The
diagnostic is spurious and can be ignored.
See <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64866>.)
Explain behavior of GNU tbl when setting boxed tables on terminals.
Drop reference to bug fixed in groff 1.23.0
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?49390>.
There's not much to say about other tbls except that they handle boxed
tables _terribly_ on terminals.
$ cat ./hello-table.roff
.TS
box;
L.
hello
.TE
$ ./bin/tbl ./hello-table.roff|./bin/nroff|cat -s # Heirloom Doctools
_______
hello
_______
|
| |
DWB tbl behaves the same way. I expect all System V Unix-descended
tbls/nroffs do the same.
This is my attempt to revise the figure by working _with_ tbl(1)
and nroff(1)/troff(1) features instead of fighting them or enduring
suffering and significant maintenance challenges.
* Stop using mn(7) display macros; the other two figures didn't and they
don't appear to be buying much.
* Use `tr` character translation feature to temporarily remap characters
for clarity of input. It's convenient to input ordinary characters
here since the table's contents are (mostly) character-cell art.
Remap `-` to minus sign and `@` to the "reverse solidus" special
character. (`\` is the default *roff escape character. It can be
changed, but attempting that seems hopeless inside a tbl(1) table.)
Revert the translations after the table. (There's nothing special
about `@`; you could choose any other character that isn't otherwise
needed in the table.)
* Use `box` region option as with Figures 1 and 2. Perhaps this wasn't
done because those are meant to depict a terminal window, but Figure 2
depicts only part of one, so its top border is a fib.
* Use `expand` region option to obtain roughly the same spread-out
effect that the table was laboriously using empty columns and the `e`
column modifier for.
* Consequently, reduce the column count to 2; both have real content.
* Annotate both keycap diagrams--in part for clarity, but also to make
it more obvious that the columns will balance in width.
These changes don't require GNU extensions to *roff or tbl except,
arguably, the \(rs special character. But support for that special
character identifier is easily added to any device-independent troff;
see §23.2 of CSTR #54 (Kernighan 1992 revision) or groff_font(5). Or I
can prepare a patch--just ask me. But given that no one seems to have
complained about the disaster that AT&T tbl/nroff must have been making
of Figures 1 and 2 for decades, I'm guessing this isn't a practical
concern. Any if it _is_ a problem, `\e` can be used instead of `\(rs`.
(I didn't use it because what is wanted is the backslash glyph
specifically [to mirror `/`], not "the escape character". But given the
constraints imposed by use of tbl(1), it's an academic point.)
On my system, the figure captions in Guidebook.ps were getting set in
Courier roman. This was clearly unintentional. Here's why it didn't
work.
1. Figures 1 and 2 selected the previous font, but only after a table
had been set. But tbl(1) does not preserve identity of the previous
font. I investigated, and none of GNU, Heirloom Doctools, nor
Documenter's Workbench tbl implementations preserve it. So the user
can't rely on it. See
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64862>.
2. Figure 3 attempted to select the roman font (typically Times), but
did so in a table cell that was empty of text. It therefore did not
have any visible effect.
* doc/Guidebook.mn: Explicitly select font `R` after setting tables. On
typesetters, put half a vee of space between the table's box border
and the figure caption.
doc/Gbk-1pg-sfx.mn is already using one half of a sound technique: set
the page length to a very large value, guaranteed to overshoot the
vertical space required by the document's text. The other half is to,
at the end of the document, set the page length to the current vertical
position, so that it ends immediately.
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Manipulating-Spacing.html
String definitions were being used with a pointless leading double
quote. This syntax is used only to define strings containing leading
space characters. (You might also use it defensively if you're defining
one string whose contents start with the interpolation of another, and
the latter might interpolate leading space--but that is not the case
here.)
Remove unnecessary leading quotes from string definitions.
* doc/Guidebook.mn: Do it. Also annotate empty strings with comment.
* sys/unix/hints/include/gbdates-post.370: Don't put them back.
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Strings.html
Stop trying to deduce whether the document is being formatted for a
typesetter (a device that can use proportional fonts) or a terminal (a
device that generally can't) by asking the formatter to measure
formatted texts. Instead, use the built-in `n` and `t` conditions that
nroff and troff have supported for this purpose since 1976 at the
latest. All known troff implementations support these.
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Operators-in-Conditionals.html
These *roff control lines were ill-formed. `.fi` is a request to turn
on filling, not a closing bracket for an `if` request (*roff is not a
Bourne shell).
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Conditional-Blocks.html
Further, *roff generally does not accept more than one request per
input line. Exceptions to this rule are the control structuring
requests (`if`, `ie`, `el`, and in GNU troff, `while`, `do` and `nop`).
But here, only one (`do`-nested) request is governed by the `if` anyway.
* doc/Guidebook.mn: Remove workaround, in favor of...
* doc/tmac.n: ...setting automatic hyphenation mode appropriate to
hyphenation systems used by AT&T-descended troffs on the one hand
("suftab") and groff (TeX hyphenation patterns) on the other.
modify results of pull request #977 to target tmac.nh instead.
Guidebook update to trigger the process following pull request 977.
G. Branden Robinson