Manpages UI reacts poorly when not fullscreen

[Taz8du29]

I think that the screenshot talks by itself...

On the left: Ubuntu manpages as of today
On the right: Ubuntu manpages from webarchive

[David Britton (dpb)]

Hi Taz, thanks for filing the bug. You can reduce the zoom level in the left pane in your example, and I believe things will look fine for you, you can even set that as the default zoom for the site (Ctrl-minus).

I'm checking with our design team to make sure it fits in their guidelines and hopefully we can give it a slightly better behavior at your target width.

[Taz8du29 (coding-4)]

I'm aware of this, but it's a non-solution for two reasons:
 - I use different machines, doing so on every of them isn't practical
 - It solves the issues only at certain zoom levels (see screenshot #2)

I've see that the line width is hard coded in the script, this is probably the reason why word wrapping is not "responsive":
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manpage-repository-dev/ubuntu-manpage-repository/trunk/view/head:/bin/fetch-man-pages.sh#L101

Also, there is an issue on the space between lines themselves, "eating" vertical page space for no reason.

Furthermore, the text width is maybe 2 or 3 points too big. I know that the percentage of smartphone users in the market has exploded, but there are still people using PCs!

[David Britton (dpb)]

Yes, unfortunately, the architecture of the site is to pre-render all manpages (which are by nature a fixed line width) and store them on disk and serve them as static files. Patches welcome to fix that behavior! I had a thought about still doing that pre-rendering phase so that search would still work, but *also* generating the page dynamically on request to adjust the width for the target resolution, but haven't implemented it yet.

[David Britton (dpb)]

There is a temporary fix to at least make it not horrible and make ctrl-minus more useable that has been approved that I attached to the bug. We are also looking at a better design to fix it more fully for the future. I'll leave the bug open until that better fix lands.

[Fedon Kadifeli (fedkad)]

I used to read man pages on the web instead of the Linux terminal. But, now this new "design" is so terrible, that I really need to ask: "What is the rationale behind this and how can I switch back to the old UI?"

[David Britton (dpb)]

@fedkad, there are no plans to make a way to switch themes. If you have something specific, please bring it up in a new bug. And "it's terrible", is very hard to fix as the old theme was replaced since likely someone thought it was terrible. :)

[David Britton (dpb)]

Fix deployed to production, please raise any new issues as a separate bug.

[C. Jeffery Small (loyhz2ay-jeff-h670zbts)]

What fix? It's about six months later and everything us still as bad as always. I reported my concerns here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manpage-repository/+bug/1789759

showing that the text in the boxes is wider than the box and cannot be read without horiz. scrolling in a normal width browser window. The overall page appears totally childish as well.

This isn't a matter of "themes," it's a question of horrible UI design from beginning to end. And the idea to:

"pre-render all manpages (which are by nature a fixed line width) and store them on disk and serve them as static files."

is a bizarre programming decision as well. This entire thing needs to be rethought from the ground up.

And what exactly was the problem with the previous manpages?

[C. Jeffery Small (loyhz2ay-jeff-h670zbts)]

As changes to the online manual pages are considered. I'd like to suggest the following comments in the marked-up screen image be considered for the new design.