Re: Reasons to not use quote signs directly?

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Wed, 2016-10-19 at 12:55:30 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:
> > Can use B<man>(N) instead of L<man(N)>. Which might be needed anyway
> > to reduce the amount of fuzzy strings. The same to using I<> instead
> > of the more semantic F<>.
> 
> I'd definitely prefer to make L<man(N)> do the right thing instead, since
> it would be nice to allow, say, a smart HTML converter to do proper links
> between man pages.

Ah perfect then, because that'd be my preference too!

> > Seems to be really needed, mostly to markup verbatim blocks, otherwise
> > the formatting would need to be dropped. :/
> 
> What sort of verbatim formatting problems have you run into?

In deb-changelog(5) there is currently this:

,---
.nf
\fIpackage\fP (\fIversion\fP) \fIdistributions\fP; \fImetadata\fP
          [optional blank line(s), stripped]
  * \fIchange-details\fP
    \fImore-change-details\fP
          [blank line(s), included in output of \fBdpkg\-parsechangelog\fP(1)]
  * \fIeven-more-change-details\fP
          [optional blank line(s), stripped]
 \-\- \fImaintainer-name\fP <\fIemail-address\fP>  \fIdate\fP
.fi
`---

which I had to convert by surrounding with «=begin man» and «=end man».
If you know of a better way, I'm interested!

But after an automated mass conversion and review, it seems it might be
the only instance, so it's not too onerous, although it sucks that it
will not be visible when converting to other output formats. :/

Also the strings to be translated go from the nice POD format that po4a
helpfully uses internally, to the raw roff markup, because the source is
POD and not roff. So we go from the previous msgid to the new one:

,---
#. type: verbatim
#: deb-changelog.5.pod
#, fuzzy, no-wrap
#| msgid ""
#| "I<package> (I<version>) I<distributions>; I<metadata>\n"
#| "          [optional blank line(s), stripped]\n"
#| "  * I<change-details>\n"
#| "    I<more-change-details>\n"
#| "          [blank line(s), included in output of B<dpkg-parsechangelog>(1)]
#| "  * I<even-more-change-details>\n"
#| "          [optional blank line(s), stripped]\n"
#| " -- I<maintainer-name> E<lt>I<email-address>E<gt>  I<date>\n"
msgid ""
".nf\n"
"\\fIpackage\\fP (\\fIversion\\fP) \\fIdistributions\\fP; \\fImetadata\\fP\n"
"          [optional blank line(s), stripped]\n"
"  * \\fIchange-details\\fP\n"
"    \\fImore-change-details\\fP\n"
"          [blank line(s), included in output of \\fBdpkg-parsechangelog\\fP(1)]\n"
"  * \\fIeven-more-change-details\\fP\n"
"          [optional blank line(s), stripped]\n"
" -- \\fImaintainer-name> <\\fIemail-address\\fP>  \\fIdate\\fP\n"
".fi\n"
"\n"
msgstr ""
`---

which is harder to translate, but as long as it's the only instance I
guess translators can survive. :)

Regards,
Guillem