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Comment by pdw | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

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