horizontal scrolling in a window narrower than 1200px

[Yuri Khan]

manpages.ubuntu.com formats man pages to a line length of 97 characters. At the specified font size of .875rem, with the root font size set to 16px, this requires about 830px (rough measurement in a correctly displayed full-screen browser).

As far as I can tell, the style sheet has two break points at 768px and 1030px.

* Below 768px, the sidebar is hidden and the whole width (minus margins) is given to the body text. As said above, this is not enough and each section has a horizontal scroll bar and is generally unreadable.

* At 768px, the sidebar appears and takes up 25% of the window width. Because of this and all the margins, there is not enough width for the man page text until the window is about 1200px wide. Each section still has a horizontal scroll bar and is unreadable.

* Nothing interesting seems to happen at 1030px.

* At 1280px, the max-width limit on the .row container kicks in; after that point, only the margins grow.

Bottom line: The man pages are only readable in a window 12.5″ or wider.

A typical desktop monitor is 24″ diagonal, and 1920px wide. One very useful configuration is to tile two windows side by side, allowing for a browser with documentation and a code editor or terminal window simultaneously. This bug is preventing the use of the site in this configuration.

I suggest:

1. Formatting the man pages at the traditional line length of 72 to 80 characters.

2. Reducing the amount of space dedicated to the sidebar.

3. (advanced) Actually testing the site usability on every browser width, at least in the range of specified break points.

[Morten Kjeldgaard (mok0)]

It's virtually impossible to read these manpages on a small screen device. The text should be made to wrap.