ps man page

["Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>]

>>> BTW, has anyone else noticed that the manpage for ps(1) is uglier
>>> than sin? Whose idea of nroff formatting is that?

It looks OK on the console and it looks OK in an xterm.

>> Mine looks okay; well, other than it being a man page and I find
>> most man pages ugly to begin with, but only because I speak English
>> instead of Developer  :) (why don't they ever give real-life
>> examples of the command instead of just techno-speak?)

I do give examples. Look near the end.

> It's not a man page at all. Especially, the author seems to be
> completely ignorant of any text formatiing system.
>
> Yeah, this is a bug report. ps (1) should be a man page formatted
> in the troff format.

It is a man page. It is formatted with troff. Look at the damn header,
and you will see troff. Obviously I am not ignorant of any text
formatting system. I know enough to beat troff into submission.

I didn't write the page like I did just for fun. I wrote it in that
strange way because a normal version looked horrid. I'd love to see
someone find a way to make a man page look good without my hack.

Check out this line from a "normal" version of the page:

----------- begin junk -----------
       For     sorting,     BSD     "O"    option    syntax    is
----------- end junk -----------

I would be most grateful to anyone who can fix that abomination while
making productive use of the standard macro package. I do not consider
huge gaps of whitespace acceptable. Perfect justification is bad enough
on a system that supports kerning, but it is a complete joke in an xterm.

After you fix that, you need to kill the hyphenation. As you can see,
I fixed the problem using brute force. Hyhenation has no place in a
modern technical document.

Next, you need to make the option tables look good. Each option should
be displayed on exactly one line, not wrapped around. That means you
need to change the left and right margins to zero. All of the option
descriptions should line up too.

Messy non-alignment like this is not acceptable:

       -N           negate selection
       -p        select by PID
       t         Select by tty
       -l         long format
       -w             wide output
       V           show version info
       M        use alternate core (try -n or N instead)

Note that those are in different sections; they should still line up.

There is one last problem, but I was not able to fix it either.
Page headers and footers should only appear on physical paper output.
When viewing a page in an xterm, page numbers are useless noise.