Re: CVS commit: src/share/man/man9

["Valeriy E. Ushakov" <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 19:42:42 +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 09:26:07PM +0300, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> > So i think that when you do the exercise of reinterpreting mandoc
> > markup as semantic markup you should assign you abstract semantic
> > accordingly.
> 
> I am not "reinterpreting mandoc markup". This is what is specified in
> mdoc(7):
> 
>      -column  This list type generates multiple columns.  The number of col-
>             umns and the width of each column is determined by the arguments
>             to the -column list, <string1>, <string2>, etc.

Shall we have exegetic discussion of the meaning of "is determined"? :)

I did the RTFS and I summarized the results in my previous mail.  I
find my interpretation, supported by troff semantic and actual
observable behaviour consistent and useful.

Your proposed interpretation (number of columns must be equal to the
number of args to -column) is not consistent with the code (the last
arg in the -column spec does set up an "extra" tab position that you
can tab to with "Ta") and is not useful as it leaves a feature gap:
you cannot specify that last column is to consume all remaining page
width using that semantic.

SY, Uwe
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