Re: [PATCH][RESEND] Escape some tilde characters causing spurious subscripts in documentation

From: Jason Sewall <jasonsewall@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2007, 21:40 UTC
Message-ID: <31e9dd080706241440s21025c26p68fda1595d531f1e@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <31e9dd080706241031m64c6be37sb4437036fda543c9@mail.gmail.com>

On 6/24/07, Jason Sewall <jasonsewall@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 49 quoted lines

> On 6/24/07, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > "Jason Sewall" <jasonsewall@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > > On 6/23/07, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I just checked with my copy of asciidoc, though, and there is no mangling
> > >> going on, at least in git-bundle.html (which is the only file I checked).
> > >> My asciidoc is version 8.2.1. What is yours?
> > >
> > > I've got 8.1.0; perhaps that's the problem. I wasn't so surprised to
> > > hear the asciidoc 7 and 8 don't get along, but I'm surprised to see
> > > that 8.1 and 8.2 are so different.
> > >
> > > Anyway, 8.1.0 is apparently what's in Fedora 7 (the distro I'm using
> > > right now) so it might be worth hanging on to the patch.
> >
> > FWIW, 7.1.2, 8.2.1 and 7.0.2 all seem to be Ok (the last one is
> > used to format the pages in html and man branches of git.git).
> > It is a bit annoying having to use name\~num at some places and
> > no backslash all others.
> >
> > Two requests:
> >
> >  - Documentation/git-rev-parse.txt has '{tilde}<n>'.  If you
> >    replace that {tilde} with a "~", how does your AsciiDoc
> >    format it?  Do you see the same breakage?
>
> Kinda. Replacing {tilde} with ~ actually causes asciidoc to fail while
> processing the file; that tilde is 'unmatched' and ends up crossing
> another tag or somesuch.
>
> >  - If it breaks, does it fix the breakage if you prefix the "~"
> >    with a backslash, instead of using {tilde}?
>
> The escaped tilde works fine.
>
> > If the answer to both questions are "yes", then perhaps we
> > should get rid of the {tilde} macro we define in
> > Documentation/asciidoc.conf file, and use your "\~" solution
> > everywhere.
> >
> > Also do you see any pattern?  It does not seem that all the
> > "master~3" are broken for you but only some.  If your commit
> > message can describe when quoting is needed, that would help
> > people who would modify the documentation in the future.
>
> I clearly need to read up on Asciidoc formatting directives before I
> could do that with confidence, but I look over it today and see what I
> can do.

Frankly, I don't see any pattern. The git documentation is very fond of ~ and ^, naturally, and these are inline delimiters in Asciidoc. Sometimes the places these appear in are unquoted, sometimes double-quoted, grave-quoted, or single-quoted; any of these can cause <sub> and <sup> tags in the html output.

I'd suggest that we put all inline revspecs inside $$...$$; this "inline passthrough" quote obeys outside quoting, and it's what AsciiMathML uses to avoid fighting reserved characters. Since ~, ^, {, }, [, ] and more all appear with great frequency in refspecs, this will save us a lot of escape characters.

There's also a few places where ~ appears in a path name; perhaps we could put $$...$$ around paths too.

Is there a documentation 'style' file or something like that for git? Something like that might be useful to help solve this sort of problem; in addition to unintentional formatting problems like the one under discussion, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what sort of quoting to use for special literal text, like git commands, refspecs, pathnames, etc. - `, ', and " abound interchangeably.

Jason

P.S. I got smarter about how to find some of these formatting problems and have found some more 'doc bugs' that I'll put into a patch once we've decided how to handle this stuff