Table columns not aligned

[ecksun]

crontab(5) does not align the table in the description.

What I see:

field allowed values
 
----- --------------
minute 0-59
hour 0-23
day of month 1-31
month 1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)

What I expect to see:

field         allowed values
-----         --------------
minute        0-59
hour          0-23
day of month  1-31
month         1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week   0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)

Browsers:

$ firefox -v
Mozilla Firefox 45.6.0
$ chromium --version
Chromium 55.0.2883.75 built on Debian stretch/sid, running on Debian stretch/sid

[stapelberg]

Thanks for the report. This seems to be a mandoc bug:

$ curl -s https://manpages.debian.org/testing/cron/crontab.5.en.gz | mandoc | grep -A 10 'allowed values'
              field     allowed values
              -----     --------------
              minute    0-59
              hour 0-23
              day of month   1-31
              month     1-12 (or names, see below)
              day of week    0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)

       A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for ``first-last''.

       Ranges of numbers are allowed.  Ranges are two numbers separated with a

Would you like to report it upstream at http://mdocml.bsd.lv/ or would you prefer if I did that?

[ecksun]

I can, but its probably more useful if you do it, I have very little knowledge about both this and the mdocml project.

[shane-kerr]

Note that this also seems to impact any code in man pages:

https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/manpages-dev/recvmmsg.2.en.html#Program_source

[shane-kerr]

This seems to be a known bug:

http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/TODO?rev=1.223&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

- In -man -Thtml, .nf does not preserve indentation.
  It should either convert blanks to  
  or use <pre> rather than <div> (like .Bd -literal does).
  Reported by afresh1@  12 Apr 2016 14:35:45 -0700

I think that this is really important.

[stapelberg]

I don’t see .nf in the table in https://manpages.debian.org/testing/cron/crontab.5.en.gz, so I think these are two separate issues. Maybe we should move this to issue #21, which talks about indentation?

I think that this is really important.

Would you have some cycles to spend on sending a patch to mandoc? That’d be much appreciated!

[ischwarze]

This is not a bug, but a missing feature.

mandoc fully supports the mdoc(7) and man(7) languages, mostly supports the tbl(7) and eqn(7) languages, and supports parts of roff(7) - those that are most commonly abused in man(7) pages. Some roff features that are both less often abused in man(7) code and particularly hard to implement are not or not yet implemented.

That crontab(5) manual page contains the low level roff(7) .ta request. Even though it occurs rarely, it occurs in more manual pages than most of the other low-level requests that are still unimplemented, Consequently, even though it is quite hard to implement properly, it is on the TODO list, but requires considerable preparatory work before implementing it can reasonably be considered.