Hi Leo,
Have you also given any consideration to how the descriptions wrap around if they are too long? For long descriptions, they can be quite ugly if left as is.
No. Frankly, I left that out.
At the moment, I output the description to a stringstream and wrap and indent everything post factum using the ": " in the output (I supply an optional line length for wrapping). This is fine and produces really nice output including embedded \n in the description text, but I wouldn't mind a more general solution.
I recall somebody mentioned existing code for proper line wrapping. Anybody knows where it is? And even if my memory has failed me and no such code is readily available, I think if you sent your code I can try integrating it with the library.
A minor nit pick, with option groups (chained options_description), the colons for the same group align but not across groups.
I agree that this can be improved upon. Noted.
Perhaps it might be possible to also dump the various fields of the output to some vector or even a templated callback object for greater flexibility of output.
Some previous version used boost::function callback for formatting, but I quickly dropped that because I don't really know who usefull is it, and what's the best interface is. - Volodya