Re: [docbook-apps] Man page stylesheet and groff hyphenation character

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

Ryan Hofschneider <hofschnr@metnet.navy.mil> writes:

> Howdy:
> 
> I've been using the man page stylesheet and noticed that function 
> names, man page references, environment variables, etc. were being 
> hyphenated. I modified the stylesheets at a few places to output the 
> groff hypenation character (\%) before the text; this prevents the 
> first word of the text from being hyphenated.

Please upload a patch with your changes -

  http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=21935&atid=516914

You'll need to set up a Sourceforge account if you don't already
have one. If that's too much of a hassle, please just e-mail the
patch to me directly.

> Is there a better way of accomplishing this? Is it worthwhile to apply 
> these changes to the source tree?

I think the better way is probably to turn off hyphenation
altogether, by default, and then add a new parameter/option for
re-enabling hyphenation (for people who want to use it). That is
what I will do for the next release of the stylesheets.

I think I will do the same thing for text justification ("filling"
and "adjusting" in groff terms). Default behavior is for text to
be justified to both the left and right margins. I'm going to
change the default so that output is ragged-right -- that is
left-justified only.

I personally don't see any need for hyphenation or
right-justification in tty/console output. I think unhyphenated,
ragged-right output is a lot more readable.

But like I said, I will add new parameters so you can optionally
re-enable the old behavior.

  --Mike

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