[Po4a-devel]Canonizing tabs

[Nicolas François]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 08:27:58AM +0100, Martin Quinson wrote:
> And from memory, the groff behaviour is to consider as verbatim any
> paragraph containing a white char (space or tab) at the first position of
> any line (not only the first one).

I could not find any reference in the info groff, but experimentally, I
would say it's only spaces, and on any line except the first one.

I fact, I'm not really concerned by tabs at the beginning of lines, but in
their middle.

> I think that this patch won't break anything.

I launched the testsuite/check script before and after the patch.
The patch changes the result for 5 pages:
metamail.1
mimencode.1
This pages are buggy.

totem.1
There were already a po4a bug for this one (due to tabs)

syslog-ng.conf.5
sane-avision.5
Not an important change (I would say these page is buggy)

So, that's what I feared and hoped: there are some differences, but on
buggy (or quite) man pages.

I'm quite uncomfortable with totem, because the author tried very hard to
use tabs as a formatting tool (using .ta).
But that makes only one page out of 5000. However, I may try to detect
when these tabs are used for formatting.


Given the advantages for the other formats, I now think it is better to use
it.

Regards,
-- 
Nekral