Replace \f where appropriate

Hi,

As you may have noticed, we're now using the recent SPDX tags, which were added in a recent SPDX release. Next plan I have for the project is to stop using \f escapes where unnecessary. I'll start tomorrow, and plan to take a few weeks.

$ grep -rn '\\f' | wc -l
4705

Branden, since this may affect your work in scripting the change to start using the MR macro, I'll keep you updated about it.

Cheers,
Alex

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

Hi Alex,

Hooray! Let me reiterate, for those who are not man(7) experts, why font style macros should be preferred, where possible, to \f escape sequences.

* The macros integrate more easily with spell checking systems. Contrast
.I length
with
\fIlenth\fP
for example.

Here, a text editor like vim(1) will mark the latter as misspelled because of the leading "fI", and you may not notice the actual spelling error within. The many false positives frustrate page maintenance and lower page quality by increasing tolerance for spelling errors.

groff's \f[] syntax for font changes is helpful here, but some projects want page sources that are portable to AT&T troff, which yet lives on Solaris 10 and possibly other places. Such projects may also complain that the brackets require "more typing".

Font style macros are less typing than both forms of escape sequence.

* In groff man(7), font style macros take care of italic corrections for you. If you only ever read man pages at a terminal you won't care about this. But if you want your man pages to look good in print, sooner or later you will start caring.

I appreciate it. I don't expect much frustration because my procedure is as follows.

1.  Start from a clean checkout.
2.  Dump all the non-.so man pages as plain text[2] to a file.
3.  Execute a sed script.
4.  Dump all the non-.so man pages as plain text to another file.
5.  Diff the two text files.
6.  Revise the sed script.
7.  "git co man*"
8.  Go to step 3.

Eventually, I will be able to break the loop after step 5.

Regards,
Branden

[1] If a man page is updated more frequently than it is read, even by its sole author, I think it is likely to be of poor quality. Nevertheless, the world is not short of people who claim to produce perfect work on the first attempt, and groff attempts to serve them as well.

[2] groff -t -mandoc -T ascii -P -cbou