man command question

[Joachim Backes]

On 03/06/2014 09:38 PM, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> 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.

Hi Cameron,

Sounds reasonable.

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

I filed a BZ.

Thanks for your answer.

Kind regards

Joachim Backes


-- 

Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)
Kernel-3.13.5-202.fc20.x86_64


Joachim Backes <joachim.backes at rhrk.uni-kl.de>
https://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~backes/de-index.html
https://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~backes/en-index.html