[bug #51362] [Patch]: Add a synonym for the font "CW"

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

Category: None => Macro - man
Severity: 3 - Normal => 2 - Minor


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[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

Status: None => In Progress
Assigned to: None => gbranden

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

Status: In Progress => Need Info

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Follow-up Comment #2:

Do we really want this? IMO it's not terribly portable for man pages to ask
for fonts that they can't get via the man macros, and when people try, they
get it wrong.

With the patch for 51364, maybe we should let the problem of suppressing the
missing font warnings bubble up to man-db?

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

Summary: [Patch]: Add a synonym for the font "CW" => [PATCH]:
Add a synonym for the font "CW"

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

Severity: 2 - Minor => 1 - Wish
Item Group: None => New feature
Status: Need Info => Wont Fix
Open/Closed: Open => Closed

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Follow-up Comment #3:

With #51364 now resolved, I don't think this is necessary, for the reasons
articulated in in this ticket's history and recent commits.

Do we really want this? IMO it's not terribly portable for man pages to ask
for fonts that they can't get via the man macros, and when people try, they
get it wrong.

Our own man page corpus is clean of CW font shenanigans now; with the recent
commit 97af31602991f330eed7b4f31354d5c34a729336, other people will get them
and can clean up their own pages accordingly. (Perhaps after complaining on
the Internet first--c'est la vie.)

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[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #51362 (project groff):

The bad practice of requesting \f(CW or .ft CW in man(7) pages is widespread
enough that mandoc(1) has been supporting it for backward compatibility for
many years. In practice, \f(CW is clearly used more often than the more
logical \f(CR (which mandoc also supports, but nor for such a long time).
That said, your point seems fair to me that there is nothing wrong with
warning authors about this particular kind of bad practice.

Support for \f[C] is clearly not needed. I don't recall encountering that in
a manual page at all, ever.

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #51362 (project groff):


[comment #4 comment #4:]

> The bad practice of requesting \f(CW or .ft CW in man(7) pages is widespread
enough that mandoc(1) has been supporting it for backward compatibility for
many years. In practice, \f(CW is clearly used more often than the more
logical \f(CR (which mandoc also supports, but nor for such a long time).
That said, your point seems fair to me that there is nothing wrong with
warning authors about this particular kind of bad practice.
>
> Support for \f[C] is clearly not needed. I don't recall encountering that
in a manual page at all, ever.

My suspicion is that this was an ms-ism that got picked up by man page
writers, because ms has had a .CW macro for as far back as I'm aware (though I
haven't done a history of it the way I did for man(7)). I guess at some point
the typesetters at Bell Labs had a Courier-ish font but only roman styling for
it.

If I'm right, this led to an unfortunate failing of imagination.

For documents targeting -Tdvi it's a little more understandable because TeX
long had its own font universe, and CW and CWI were their (only?) choices for
something monospaced.