Bug#111919: acknowledged by developer (Escaping characters and collapsing of white space)

[Richard Atterer <atterer@debian.org>]

Luk Claes wrote:
> You should invoke docbook-to-man with INSTANT_OPT set to a space if you
> want to use some special characters literally in your SGML file. This
> also takes care of collapsing white space into one space.
> 
> INSTANT_OPT=" " docbook-to-man src.sgml > dst.1
                         ^^^^
You *do* mean docbook2man (docbook-utils package) and not docbook-to-man 
(docbook-to-man package), right? The bug is about docbook2man.

> PS: Maybe I should emphasize it more in the manpage?

No, sorry - you should make this behaviour the default!

Users expect docbook2man to create a manpage from their SGML which "just 
works". The current behaviour causes invalid manpages to be output, which 
is not desirable.

The SGML spec says that programs which process SGML should treat runs of
whitespace characters exactly like a single space character. docbook2man
does not do this - it copies multiple spaces to the output manpage
unchanged.

Similarly, I agree with Colin that it's docbook2man's job to escape special
characters - ask yourself: Why would anyone *want* parts of their SGML to
be interpreted as groff? This is not a useful feature, so the behaviour 
should be changed.

Please fix these two bugs!

Cheers,

  Richard

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