Really long interrupt description titles

[shidel]

While performing some typographic corrections, I was reminded that some Interrupt Titles have very long descriptions. Often this leads to words being abbreviated. Such abbreviations are often non-standard. For example, look at the description for Netware 21C706.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Unique ID: 21C706
  Category: N 	network
      Flag: n/a
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

INT 21 - Novell NetWare - TRANSACTION TRACKING SYSTEM - SET APPLICTN THRESHOLDS
	AX = C706h
	CL = maximum logical record locks (default 0)
	CH = maximum physical record locks (default 0)
Return: AL = status
	    00h successful
Desc:	specify the per-application limits on record locks allowed before an
	  implicit transaction is begun
Notes:	this function is supported by NetWare 4.0+ and Advanced NetWare 1.0+
	if either limit is set to FFh, implicit transactions are disabled for
	  the corresponding lock type
SeeAlso: AX=C705h,AX=C708h,AX=F222h/SF=06h

That text is as long as possible without causing a line-wrap when viewed in 80 columns.

The problem is the abbreviation "APPLICTN." If a user is simply searching the text for "application thresholds", this entry would never appear. That abbreviated phrase only appears in the title and not the body of the entry.

But if the word in the description is not abbreviated, the title would need to be more than one line. A parser (like the upcoming makehtml) could contain a list of words and expand them on-the-fly when generating the HTML. However, this would not help anyone performing a direct text search on the LST files.

Any thoughts?

[ecm-pushbx]

The dynamic summary lines generated by IntList can already exceed 79 columns due to appending register states, sometimes as many as three registers and some may list multiple values. So for that use case I wouldn't be opposed to just letting it (a single line) overflow the usual width.

Maybe we could have a similar option in makelist as the sort-as IDs, so the default summary base line is the first nonempty line after the header and there could be some way to specify a (shorter) legacy summary base line after the normal one or in the header?

[shidel]

I think the text in the generated LST files should stay under 80 characters per line for readability purposes. But, we could easily add a simple *nix trick. When that first line ends in a \, it continues on the next line. Repeat until the line no longer continues. After all, no title ends in that character. (Only in --modern mode)

I was also thinking about doing a search/replace on the title for either --legacy or --modern modes. But, that would require updating the list of replacements any time one was found or needed changed. A new field in the header would be easy to implement in makelist. Just a matter of what to call the field and decide in which mode it is applied.

[shidel]

If the header contained the expanded title for the --modern (default) mode. Then that \ line expansion could just be handled by makelist while building the LST files. It could be something like:

  TITLE: Novell NetWare
  TITLE: TRANSACTION TRACKING SYSTEM
  TITLE: SET APPLICATION THRESHOLDS

Then, makelist would use everything up to the first - of the Legacy title and then glue those header pieces together using - and word-wrap any excess using the \. Basically creating this for the the title:

INT 21 - Novell NetWare - TRANSACTION TRACKING SYSTEM - SET APPLICATION \
THRESHOLDS

Or it could word-wrap (leaving out the -) the pieces like:

INT 21 - Novell NetWare - TRANSACTION TRACKING SYSTEM \
SET APPLICATION THRESHOLDS

[ecm-pushbx]

I'd rather spell out any dashes you want to include, with optional whitespace before or after the \<EOL> which will be collapsed into a single blank when building the dynamic summary.

[ecm-pushbx]

Maybe using the backslash continuation for both source and compiled files is best. Then just let IntList or other readers collapse the continued line into a single line if they so desire.