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There is plenty of formatting to be applied to plain text, and which cannot be done manually by author (clang-format, anyone?). - Wrapping the lines to termina
by theamk 3y ago
There is plenty of formatting to be applied to plain text, and which cannot be done manually by author (clang-format, anyone?).
- Wrapping the lines to terminal window width
- Indenting blocks
- _Basic_ formatting (bold, underline - OK, colors - NO)
- Common blocks (like option descriptions) which apply consistent combination of rules above
Everything else should be plain text, just like the the computer code or shell commands.
(There is an interesting question of why is bold text accessible in manpage but not in code.. I think the answer for that is code's equivalent is syntax highlighter. Computer languages are regular enough that we can have computer highlight various syntaxical elements; while human languages are not, so we need to ask manpage authors to highlight them for us)