[Docutils-develop] [docutils:bugs] Re: #497 manpage writer renders links incorrectly

[G. B. R. <br...@us...>]

> One thing that I would possibly change about alacritty variant is: don't put fancy brackets around aa...@bb... and dd...@gm... (they seem out of place because these are emails not links, and they are not clickable).

I didn't test _alacritty_ myself, but if I understand you correctly...

...I agree.  In my opinion, the terminal device should not perform any transformations on the grapheme content of character cells to reflect semantic content, and especially should not perform transformations that change how many character cells a character sequence occupies on the terminal.  (We have to make an exception for cases where the terminal must format U+FFFD to represent an unavailable or invalid UTF-8 character.)

I find myself wondering if alacritty's automatic angle bracketing corrupts the display when _curses_ is used.


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**[bugs:#497] manpage writer renders links incorrectly**

**Status:** open-fixed
**Labels:** manpage writer 
**Created:** Tue Feb 11, 2025 11:03 PM UTC by Ulya Trofimovich
**Last Updated:** Sat Apr 26, 2025 07:20 AM UTC
**Owner:** engelbert gruber


Hi! Here's an example bug.rst file (trimmed from a real-world manpage AUTHORS section and changed to hide real names):
~~~
$ cat bug.rst
Aaaaa (aa...@bb...),
`Bbb <https://github.com/cc>`_ (dd...@gm...),
`mm <https://github.com/m>`_
`nn <https://github.com/nn>`_
and `OooOoooo <https://github.com/OooOoooo>`_.
~~~
With rst2man (Docutils 0.21.2, Python 3.12.8, on linux) it is rendered as follows (I cut first and last output lines in the output as they obscure the view and are irrelevant):
~~~
$ rst2man bug.rst > bug.1 && man ./bug.1
NAME
        - Aaaaa ( <aa...@bb...> ), Bbb <https://github.com/cc>
        ( <dd...@gm...> ), mm <https://github.com/m>

        <nn> and  <OooOoooo> .
~~~
What I think is wrong:

1. In <nn> and <OooOoooo> URI had been removed completely (note that they are different from other addresses in that the substitution text is the same as the last URI path component)
2. spaces surrounding email in parentheses look weird
3. newlines seem to be inserted at random

I would like it to be rendered like this:
~~~
NAME
        - Aaaaa (aa...@bb...), Bbb <https://github.com/cc> (dd...@gm...), mm <https://github.com/m> nn <https://github.com/nn> and OooOoooo <https://github.com/OooOoooo>.
~~~
    
I suspect this is the change in https://docutils.sourceforge.io/RELEASE-NOTES.html#release-0-21-2024-04-09, as I saw other changes listed in this release in the same diff with the breaking changes described above.


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