[GTALUG] war story: fixing a doc bug can be hard

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2019-04-09 1:47 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> I assume that there is some perl convention for documentation (POD?),
> but I'm not immersed in that culture.

Yeah, POD can make a decent man page without fiddling with groff. But
maybe test the source with sane-width terminals (<= 80 cols) to see if
any reformatting must be made.

Outside groff, there's also the Heirloom Documentation Tools
<http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html> which are somehow based
on the original Solaris source. A newer - and frankly glorious - option
is A G Rudi's Neatroff <http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatstart.pdf> that's not
only able to typeset bi-di texts but it also handles Opentype ligatures
for efficient handling of Arabic and Farsi.

> |    How many people are limited to 80 columns.
> 
> You are being sarcastic, right?

80 column terminals aren't the thing amongst the kids today. Used to
work with folks who'd use full-screen terminals with 8 px fonts, and not
windowed with tmux or anything.

> Buy an UltraHD TV or monitor. 

Or get two 16x9s, and flip one vertically. It means your desktop looks a
bit O_o, but it works.

cheers,
 Stewart