Ken Hornstein writes:
I just pushed a new nmh.7 man page. Along with Paul's content changes,
it includes the troff source changes I am planning to make across the
board. Specifically, I'm getting rid of the .RS/.RE/.fc/.ta hackery and
replacing it with .TP tagged paragraphs. These changes also let me
replace some of the embedded \fXasdf\fY usage with the standard font
change macros (.B, .I, .IR, etc), which might help the mandoc folks.
I'm not a troff/man guru by any means ... so I was wondering: why
these changes? I'm not complaining about them, it's more for my
own understanding. Example: I understand that .B and \fB do the
same thing, but why is the former preferred?
I don't know if they do *exactly* the same thing. From mandoc's man(7) page
(http://mdocml.bsd.lv/man.7.html#x466f6e742068616e646c696e67):
In man documents, both Physical markup macros and roff(7) `\f' font
escape sequences can be used to choose fonts. In text lines, the effect
of manual font selection by escape sequences only lasts until the next
macro invocation; in macro lines, it only lasts until the end of the
macro scope.
As far as I know, \fB is not deprecated: it is used in the skeleton
document in the above page. That page is worth reading, by the way;
it is probably one of the best references on the man language around.
The nmh man pages do have some problematic constructs, which I asked about
on the mandoc mailing list some time ago. Ingo Schwarze, an OpenBSD
developer (and a manpage expert if I ever saw one), replied:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tools.mdocml.user/497/
--
Anthony J. Bentley
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