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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Why is the formatting so messed up? Page seems to be fixed width but not wide enough for an actual line so all lines soft wrap?…

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This is a man page[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

I know. And it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/jfbNCrO

The page looks better at about 950px and above... that sidebar doesn't help.

Looks like it renders correctly at 50% zoom.

I think it may have something to do with display:flex. CSS isn't a strength of mine but looking at the computed view, there's a wide inflexible margin on the right side that causes the text to wrap before it otherwise would need to on smaller screen widths. The nav causes the same on the left side.

And it's a very poor rendering of a man page. man can generate HTML or PDF output if you want it:

    man -Thtml ls > ls.html
    man -Tpdf ls > ls.pdf

The choice is most likely deliberate: this is a 9front crowd (Plan9's aesthetic choices are rather peculiar). It's what man(1) should display on a 80-column or so terminal.

Sticking to 80 columns and thinking in terms of terminals is exactly opposite of Plan 9 culture though.

Debatable: 80 columns ease reading, as each line is completely within the cone of vision. It's not enforced in their style(5)[0], but the code mostly and naturally (e.g. short variable names) falls within this limit (random sample[1]).

(I don't think that Plan9's "not thinking in terms of terminals", which is more of a "a better-than-X11 GUI is the default UI" is really relevant in this context)

EDIT: I don't have a Plan9 box around, but at least on plan9port, man(1) by default wraps lines to 72 columns or so.

[0]: https://man.cat-v.org/clive/6/style

[1]: https://github.com/plan9foundation/plan9/blob/main/sys/src/c...

Groff's HTML output is very poor. It's a sad day when it's more convenient to generate postscript and convert to PDF than it is to read the directly generated HTML output...

(I know other roffs are available).

Fix:

    body > nav { min-width: 5em; }
    article { flex-basis: 45em;}

It's intended for fixed-width font and lines are folded to 70 chars.

Yeah but I have more than enough available screen real estate for 70 chars. Seems like some pretty excessive padding on the page causes the lines to wrap much sooner than they should or something effectively similar.

I think it would be clearer if the "description" sections didn't wrap under the "header" sections (e.g. when you narrow the page the descriptions wrap and display to the left of their headers, which is real weird). That's because the content is in a big `pre` block--any spacing on the left is just blank space in the content--so it'll wrap as one block. I'm pretty naive here, but it's probably way easier to say "put this in a `pre` block" than "parse the roff and generate HTML" (although I'm sure there are tools that do this really well...)

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