Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 02:15:58 -0600 From: Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ab.ca> To: Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, "Andrey A. Chernov" <ache@nagual.pp.ru>, "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: color, again, in grotty Message-ID: <200210210815.g9L8Fx88081707@orthanc.ab.ca> In-Reply-To: Message from Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.ORG> of "Mon, 21 Oct 2002 10:40:56 %2B0300." <20021021074056.GE14584@sunbay.com>
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>This only covers _attributes_, but not color sequences, which are >the Subject: here. While we can still use an old scheme to produce >device-independent sequences for attributes, we lose the color >support completely: FreeBSD's man(1) will be black-n-white forever. That's right. It will, forever, have to support printing manual pages on output devices that do not support colour. But this is far from the point. As Terry mentioned, the notion of the nroff "tty" device as a monochromatic, sometimes overstriking, printer is firmly entrenched. And the format, by the nature of its simplicity, is universal. The idea of changing it now tells me that the groff maintainers need to learn some history, lest they repeat it. Haven't we learned a lesson from HTML? The unreadable colour combinations are bad enough there. The *LAST* thing I need is man pages with unreadable colour markup. What possible purpose can colour output from nroff serve, other than to satisfy someones craving for more blinkenlitz? We're knocking on the door of the twilight zone here, folks. As an aside, I'm about 1/4 of the way through bringing the 4.4BSD ditroff into the current millenium. I think it's time to up the priority on this project. --lyndon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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