Re: [Patch] reformat man buffer on the fly for man.el

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> When I lookup manpage occasionally I prefer reading some of it with
> windows side by side. cBut when I find myself need to concentrate on one
> looked-up manpage, I would like to C-x 1 then reformat the Man buffer
> and read it from begin to end.

That makes sense, indeed.

>> It will also solve the problem that if generating the manpage takes
>> a long time, it ends up popping up in your face unexpectedly (since
>> you've lost patience in the mean time and moved on to something
>> else).
> Generating the manpage is so fast for me that this senario has never
> occurred to me.

Yes, usually it's very quick.  But when it's not (e.g. manpage on
a remote server that's temporarily down), it hurts.

As you say, when it's very quick, there's no point running the process
asynchronously, and neither is it useful to only display the buffer
after the rendering is done.

> One question about the following code:

>   (if (fboundp 'start-process)
>      (start-process ...)
>     (call-process ...))

> Is it due to once in Emacs history when there is no `start-process' but
> only `call-process', Can you fill me in?

The FreeDOS build of Emacs doesn't support start-process (because
FreeDOS doesn't support multiprocessing).


        Stefan