Prebuilt man pages on Google code

John Keeping· Dec 16, 2012, 16:28 UTC · lore

While investigating Asciidoc's quoting in this thread [1], I noticed that my system man pages don't display Asciidoc double quoted text correctly.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/211533

For example in git-fast-import(1):

   Here <name> is the person’s display name (for example `Com M Itter'')
   and `<email> is the person’s email address (`cm@example.com''). `LT
   and GT are the literal less-than (\x3c) and greater-than (\x3e)
   symbols.

It turns out that Gentoo installs the man pages from git-core on Google code, and the error can be seen in the "source" there [2].

[2] http://code.google.com/p/git-manpages/source/browse/man1/git-fast-import.1#379

When I generate man pages here, I get paired quotes (\u201C and \u201D):

   Here <name> is the person’s display name (for example “Com M Itter”)
   and <email> is the person’s email address (“cm@example.com”). LT and
   GT are the literal less-than (\x3c) and greater-than (\x3e) symbol

I can't see any configuration option that could cause this difference, so I assume it must be caused by some particular tool version on the machine used to generate these man pages.

If the output is a side-effect of avoiding non-ASCII characters, is is useful to do something like this (with appropriate Makefile support)?

diff --git a/Documentation/asciidoc.conf b/Documentation/asciidoc.conf
index 1273a85..6655ec7 100644
--- a/Documentation/asciidoc.conf
+++ b/Documentation/asciidoc.conf
@@ -89,6 +89,16 @@ template::[header-declarations]
 endif::backend-docbook[]
 endif::doctype-manpage[]
 
+ifdef::doctype-manpage[]
+ifdef::git-asciidoc-man-ascii[]
+[attributes]
+lsquo=&#39;
+rsquo=&#39;
+ldquo=&#34;
+rdquo=&#34;
+endif::git-asciidoc-man-ascii[]
+endif::doctype-manpage[]
+
 ifdef::backend-xhtml11[]
 [attributes]
 git-relative-html-prefix=

Junio C Hamano· Dec 18, 2012, 23:03 UTC · re: John Keeping · lore

Re: Prebuilt man pages on Google code

John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> While investigating Asciidoc's quoting in this thread [1], I noticed
> that my system man pages don't display Asciidoc double quoted text
> correctly.
> ...
> I can't see any configuration option that could cause this difference,
> so I assume it must be caused by some particular tool version on the
> machine used to generate these man pages.

Yeah, Debian ships with a tad older one, and I've been using asciidoc 8.5.2 on my primary box.

I'm experimenting a newer one from the latest tarball (asciidoc 8.6.8) and the result looks promising. If everything goes smoothly, I'll probably do another -rc before the final 1.8.1 release goes out with the new asciidoc, but no promises (yet).

Thanks.