time.1: ffix

v2: Include more background on proper ellipsis usage.

Mark up ellipses properly. They should be in roman. The item preceding an ellipsis should be in the singular. Use unbreakable space between metasyntactic variable and subsequent ellipsis.

Quoting groff_man_style(7):

• Symbols that are neither to be typed literally nor replaced at the user’s discretion appear in the roman style; brackets surround optional arguments, and an ellipsis indicates that the previous syntactical element may be repeated arbitrarily.
[...]
• The dummy character escape sequence \& follows the ellipsis when further text will follow after space on the output line, keeping its last period from being interpreted as the end of a sentence and causing additional inter‐sentence space to be placed after it.
[...]
\| Thin space (one‐sixth em on typesetters, zero‐width on
terminals); a non‐breaking space. Used primarily in ellipses (“.\|.\|.”) to space the dots more pleasantly on typesetting devices like dvi, pdf, and ps.
[...]
• Why doesn’t the package provide a string to insert an ellipsis? Examples of ellipsis usage are shown above, in subsection “Command synopsis macros”. The idiomatic roff ellipsis is three dots (periods) with thin space escape sequences \| internally separating them. Since dots both begin control lines and are candidate end‐of‐sentence characters, however, it is sometimes necessary to prefix and/or suffix an ellipsis with the dummy character escape sequence \&. That fact stands even if a string is defined to contain the sequence; further, if the string ends with \&, end‐of‐sentence detection is defeated when you use the string at the end of an actual sentence. (Ending a sentence with an ellipsis is often poor style, but not always.) A hypothetical string EL that contained an ellipsis, but not the trailing dummy character \&, would then need to be suffixed with the latter when not ending a sentence.

Instead of... ...do this.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
.ds EL \&.\|.\|. Arguments are
Arguments are .IR src‐file\~ .\|.\|.\&
.IR src‐file\~ \*(EL\& .IR dest‐dir .
.IR dest‐dir . ──────────────────────────────────────────────────

The first column practices a false economy; the savings in typing is offset by the cost of obscuring even the suggestion of an ellipsis to a casual reader of the source document, and reduced portability to non‐roff man page formatters that cannot handle string definitions.

There is an ellipsis code point in Unicode, and some fonts have an ellipsis glyph, which some man pages have accessed in a non‐ portable way with the font‐dependent \N escape sequence. We discourage the use of these; on terminals, they may crowd the dots into a half‐width character cell, and will not render at all if the output device doesn’t have the glyph. In syntax synopses, missing ellipses can cause great confusion. Dots and space are universally supported.

---
 man1/time.1 | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

index efb818cfd..8902b4b96 100644
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ .SH NAME
 time \- time a simple command or give resource usage
 .SH SYNOPSIS
 .B time
-.RI [ options ] " command " [ arguments... ]
+.RI [ option \~.\|.\|.\&] " command " [ argument \~.\|.\|.]
 .SH DESCRIPTION
 The
 .B time

2.30.2

Hi Branden,

On 2023-07-28 19:02, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

Huh! Do you own a DeLorean?

I was very confused, because this v2 series ended up in my mailbox as being older than the v1.

Thanks!

Sorry for not noticing earlier. Please also document why an unbreakable space should be added between the metasyntactic variable and the subsequent ellipsis. I've seen both kinds of uses all around, and would like to have some reasons to prefer one over the other.

Cheers,
Alex

<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5