man command question

[Cameron Simpson]

On 06Mar2014 16:19, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> Joachim Backes <joachim.backes at rhrk.uni-kl.de> writes:
> > I'm running F20 on gnome3 desktop,
> > and I see some weird effect in the man command (entered in a gnome
> > terminal) if using the "-P" command option:
> >
> > man -P cat man >/dev/null
> >
> > should use the cat command as pager. I get the expected effect, but one
> > or more additional messages to stderr:
> >
> > <standard input>:981: warning [p 7, 5.8i, div `3tbd1,0', 0.0i]: cannot
> > adjust line
> > <standard input>:990: warning [p 7, 5.8i, div `3tbd4,0', 0.0i]: cannot
> > adjust line
> >
> >
> > Anybody knows what this means? No such message if the gnome terminal is
> > wide enough.
> 
> It probably means what it says.  You can format man pages with a
> variable number of characters per line, hence you might have "(setq
> Man-width 75)" in your ~/.emacs to get a reasonably formatted display
> rather than one with the lines being too long for comfortable reading.
> 
> Now say, you specify zero characters per line, and the software may
> suddenly have a hard time adjusting the lines.

In case lee's unclear: the output of "man" isn't going to your terminal any
more, so it doesn't know how wide the output should be.

Personally I would expect it to default to assuming an 80-column output and
format for that. But it appears not.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.    - Oscar Wilde