Re: man -t odd page size
- From: Ian Smith <smithi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:42:44 +1100 (EST)
Gonzalo, please cc those to whom you are responding. I had to dig this
out of the digest, which breaks the threading ..
On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:35:36 -0200 Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[..]
[..]On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Ian Smith <smithi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:35:25 -0200 Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Does an inmensily huge majority have to walk the extra mile in order
> to
get an
> ISO compliant document whereas a small minority benefits from having
> non
ISO
> complaint default formats???
Gmail does a superb job of formatting quotes, eh?
Gonzalo: shouldn't that be 'the extra kilometre?' :)
Well, a quarter of the people on this planet live in China, so by your
theory shouldn't the FreeBSD lists, docs and code all be in Chinese?
No .. languages are not ISO standards... let alone the fact that we are not
discussing languages in here.
ISO is just another committee. I think what you're really complaining
about is that the US tends to ignore international standards. We know
that, it's more about politics .. also not being discussed in here :)
I doubt an 'immensely huge majority' of FreeBSD systems are located
outside the US (data at http://www.bsdstats.org/freebsd/countries.php
notwithstanding, reckoning Australia to have the most FreeBSD users :)
That's only if you take bsdstats as the ultimate and most authoritative word
on the location of FreeBSD based systems. I do not. And actually Im running 3
FreeBSD systems in my place and Argentina doesn't even figure on that list.
My point exactly! So where do you get your assumption that the majority
of FreeBSD systems, let alone an 'immensely huge' majority, are located
outside the US? I don't say the opposite, just that it's unproveable.
> > > and on a side note: will we ever get to see ISO 216 A4 as the
default
> > > choice for output instead of not-standard, only usefull in the US
but
> > > useless in the rest of the whole world "letter" page size and the
> > > likes???
I've yet to run into any printing or display software that didn't offer
a wide choice of formats, including A4 and many other A* sizes, so what
any particular software chooses as its 'default' scarcely matters.
To you .. but not for me or for anyone who lives in a country in which
non-iso-standard paper (like letter) is simply _not_available_ or costs twice
as much as A4.
Australia went metric in the mid '70s, and I don't know where I could
find letter-size paper if I wanted any, which I don't. Nor do I find it
any great inconvenience to select A4 for printing. Storm in a teacup?
I undertand this may not be a problem for someone who can just "man -t man |
ps2pdf14 - > man_getopt" and get a printable pdf that uses the whole page but
I have to go "zcat `man -w ls` | groff -Tps -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4 -mandoc |
ps2pdf - tmp.pdf" in order to get a usefull output or use the first method
and waste a lot of paper (wasting resources .. wich is something the, we,
citizens of the third world can not afford).
Oh please. I wouldn't try remembering either of those incantations, and
any process complicated enough to require looking up in the man/s goes
into a one or two-line script here. I can't afford wasted time either.
> > Greetings from Germany, where A4 is the standard for more than
> > a century now. =^_^=
>
> I really hope they do, or at least, start contemplating the fact that
ISO
> standards are usefull as a whole or are not usefull at all ..
That's not true at all; there's no 'all or nothing' about standards.
What actually works and is adopted in the real world determines that.
ISO 216 works (and it has worked ever since it's conception, more than 100
years ago) and is adopted in the real world, except for the US, Mexico and
Canada.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
Sure. We use it here. But I don't see much point in complaining about
those who use something else. We drive on the left side of the road too
and would still do so should ISO publish a 'standard' to the contrary :)
[For North American readers, there's a list of A4 vendors on that page]
Ask yourself: how come the world uses TCP/IP for internet communications
rather than the OSI X.200-X.219 suite? How come we're still using SMTP
plus a pile of RFCs to deliver email rather than the X.400-X.420 suite?
It became a defacto standard ... Just as much as Microsoft Windows did .. Are
by any chance using Windows?????
No, and it's 'reductio ad absurdum' to mention Windows in this context.
If you'd actually read much of the OSI stuff - assuming you had a spare
year or two - you'd know that TCP/IP became the standard because a) it
was working long before the ISO stuff was even being formally tested or
the various plenary conferences had near finished arguing all the finer
points and b) the standards processes via the IETF, IANA, IEEE and the
like (RFCs) were far more accessible and most importantly free for the
likes of you and me to participate in their development, quite unlike
the rarified CCITT/ITU/ISO academic hierarchical processes (IMHO!)
Apart from SNMP and its use of (a subset of) the ASN.1 / BER notation,
and the X.500-X.521 directory services model to the extent of X.501
certificates, not much of the massive CCITT / OSI / ISO 'standards' have
ever entered common usage, most being a camel designed by committee.
In '91 I bought three 'fascicles' (volumes) of the CCITT Blue Book for
the best part of A$500, then convinced it was the way things would go.
I was entirely wrong :) but I don't regret that study for ASN.1 alone.
Sorry to hear that :(
ASN.1 and the BER are actually very clever stuff, intellectually, though
the need for finely packing everything in binary became less relevant in
many spheres as computing horsepower rendered turning back to plain text
encoding much less of an impediment. I recall that in '91 my 14400bps
V.32bis modem suitable for international data transfer cost just under
A$2000, the price then of a fairly decent used car. How times change ..
cheers, Ian
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