I'm reading dnf(8) on Fedora 29 and get irked by the layout of the options. --disableexcludes=[all|main|<repoid>], --disableexcludepkgs=[all|main|<repoid>] Here's what "man dnf" shows on a terminal that is 80 columns wide. Ugly. --disableexcludes=[all|main|<repoid>], --disableexcludep‐ kgs=[all|main|<repoid>] For those of you with MUAs that mangle this kind of stuff: the two options don't fit on one line so something broke the line in a terrible place and then filled the whitespace to justify the result. It would be a lot better to just break the line at the whitespace and to not justify the result. The "not justify" part should just fall out of there being no whitespace to stretch. In an attempt to fix this, I tried to figure out how this problem arose. Surely this would be easy -- I was a troff adept forty years ago. And surely troff couldn't have change much because (1) the orginal author, Joe Osssanna, died in 1977 (2) (I think) it is chained down by POSIX standard (3) the language rules made it hard to extend It turns out that the document representation and transformation isn't what I thought it was. It used to be that one wrote man pages in troff, using the "an" macros, optionally with tbl preprocessing for tables. The dnf documentation is in a Python representation called reStructured Text (.rst), not troff. The .rst gets formatted by a thing called sphinx, a complex Python system. Among other things, it produces a formatted manpage that gets shipped inside the dnf RPM. So that seems easy, if odd. But no. That formatting cannot take account of terminal width or characteristics. So the man command, when confronted with one of these files, process it in an intricate way, approximately: gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man8/dnf.8.gz | /usr/bin/preconv -e UTF-8 | /usr/bin/tbl | /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 | /usr/bin/less -r The most peculiar part of that pipeline preconv. It converts the formatted document back into troff input! In the case of dnf(8), the resulting troff file has a few problems with the paragraph for these option but they don't explain this particular misformatting. The main problem seems to be in the "andoc" macros or in groff (the GNU implementation of *roff). And yes, groff has differences from the troff I knew 40 years ago. Getting this far in the problem has taken a few steps. - download the source for dnf and build the .rpm - attempt to figure out what builds what. The build log isn't as clear as I'd hope. I mistakenly thought it was rst2man but it is sphinx (they do share code). - air my issues on an appropriate mailing list. Contrary to the documentation, you actually have to join the list to post. So far this is the only traffic on the list this month. <https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/mailman/docutils-users/?viewmonth=201904> Current state: - I think that some things are wrong with the resulting ephemeral nroff document but I don't know what's at fault and it isn't too important to me. I've reported it to the responsible authorities but I'm not sure that they accept that there are problems. - nroff -mandoc is doing something inappropriate with .TP macros but I don't know where the blame lies. It surely requires engaging with another community. I may run out of steam before getting farther.