Re: [PATCH v3 4/8] doc: give headings for the two and three dot notations

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 12, 2016, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20160712221205.GA9390@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <37D91D4F45C6444792E9B9205EF88BE1@PhilipOakley>

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 10:41:35PM +0100, Philip Oakley wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> > > +The '{caret}' (caret) notation
> > > +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > >   To exclude commits reachable from a commit, a prefix '{caret}'
> > >   notation is used.  E.g. '{caret}r1 r2' means commits reachable
> > >   from 'r2' but exclude the ones reachable from 'r1'.
> > 
> > All of these headings render poorly in the manpage, at least for me
> > (Ubuntu 16.04).  Only the first word appears in bold; the '-quoted text
> > is not bold but underlined, and the rest of the header is plain.
> 
> Which doc package is that with? It had formatted OK for the html web pages.

I get the same with:

  make gitrevisions.7
  man -l gitrevisions.7

Asciidoc 8.6.9, docbook-xsl 4.5 if it matters.

Rendering single-quotes as underline is normal in this case (though it's not great for punctuation like this, as it kind of blends with the dots; I know we use it elsewhere in this document, though). The failure to continue the bold through the end of line looks like a bug, though.

The generated XML (from asciidoc) looks reasonable:

  <title>The <emphasis>..</emphasis> (two-dot) range notation</title>

The roff looks like:

  .SS "The \fI\&.\&.\fR (two\-dot) range notation"

The "\fR" switches us back to "Roman" from italics, which is presumably the problem. We really want to say "switch back what we were using before \fI".

Switching it to "\fP" fixes it, but it's not clear to me if that's actually portable, or a groff-ism. I don't know roff very well and documentation seems to be quite hard to find. So it's either a bug in docbook, or an intentional decision they've made because roff can't portably do better. I'm not sure which.

-Peff