[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[AEF]

On Feb 2, 9:39 am, Paul Sture <nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
> In article
> <6a28aa9f-b23c-4aec-a419-18932d045... at n2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>,
>
>  AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Reading Unix documentation is no fun. The man pages are formatted with
> > proportional spacing of fixed-width characters so as to make the right
> > margin straight. That makes it ugly and hard to read. The business
> > world ruled it out long ago. Ragged edge is the way to go with fixed-
> > width font.
>
> The VMS documentation itself was the first to go for a ragged right edge
> and fixed-width characters after being right aligned for so many years.
>
> I liked the look and wrote my CV to look like that (until someone
> complained 'it didn't look professional' - not my fault they were behind
> the times, but I adapted it in the light of their comment).

Right justification is okay if done properly. Not only must one not
use a fixed-width font, but it's also important to be sure you don't
get long vertical runs of spaces, i.e., spaces lined up in about the
same part of a line for several lines in a row.

There's a lot more to typography than just this. Unfortunately,
webpage designers seem to have next to zero knowledge of it (and
probably don't even know there is such a thing), resulting in many
webpages that are harder to use and read than they could be. A very
typical problem is very long lines. It's like reading a lease. At
least the lines should wrap when you re-size the window.

> > It's amazing I ever stumbled upon the 'cd -' command, which useful for
> > going to your previous working directory. I certainly wouldn't have
> > found it here!
>
> See my answer to VAXman.

While it is there:

lowed.   An  argument  of - is equivalent to $OLDPWD.  If a non-

can you tell me how I would come up with

man bash | col -bx | sed -n '/^SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS/,$p' | less

when "man cd" doesn't even tell you you're using bash? And if I'm at
the level where I could come up with the command quoted above, I'm
already well past the point of whether commands being "cryptic" even
matters.

Compare:

lowed.   An  argument  of - is equivalent to $OLDPWD.  If a non-

lowed. An argument of - is equivalent to $OLDPWD. If a non-

>
> --
> Paul Sture

AEF