How does man know?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <3559 at cbnewsc.ATT.COM> gregg at cbnewsc.ATT.COM (gregg.g.wonderly) writes:
>The best example is printing manual pages.  My manual program does
>NOT provide a printing feature.  Instead it provides the capability
>to return the path to the manual pages so that nroff/troff/whatever
>can be used to format it.

Jesus, what's the difference between formatting a manual page to a
terminal and to a printer?  You can't even tell whether I'm using
my terminal window as a port to access an attached printer or not.
I may also be using a Braille terminal, and would disappreciate
pagination.  There are far more possible environments than you
can anticipate, which is why you should not hard-wire in limiting
environmental assumptions.

By catering to obsolete technology as your assumed "common case"
and insisting that better uses of the software will have to be
accommodated by additional programming effort, you're providing a
powerful disincentive to improve the computing environment!