Bug#226345: glibc-doc: Incorrect and unsightly formatting in man pages

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 04:15:56PM -0500, Gregory Stark wrote:
> There seems to be a strange use of exclamation marks to emphasize text
> in the glibc-doc man pages. This is not how man pages are formatted.
> Looking at other man pages it seems the nroff code that should be used
> for these cases is .BR.

Yes, specifically:

  .BR pthread_equal (3),
  .BR pthread_join (3),
  [etc.]

This macro just alternates its arguments between bold and roman fonts.

(As a point of pedantry, this isn't a feature of [nt]roff itself, but of
the -man macro set. The -mdoc macro set, commonly used in BSD-derived
documentation, uses the .Xr macro to format cross-references.)

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]