On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 09:45:17AM +0200, Bruce Allen wrote: > Dear Bjarni, > > thanks very much for the corrections/patches to the man pages. > > I reviewed the diff and it looks good. Something I was wondering: why are > you inserting the zero width characters '\&' in various places? I thought > that there were only needed to avoid an input sequence being misinterpreted > as a control character. But in many places where you have inserted it, I > did not realize that this was a possibility. > '\&' is, with the current layout of the source text, unnecessary, but the position of the words can later change. So using '\&' is just a measure in advance.
My explanation was: Protect a period (.) or a apostrophe (') with '\&' from becoming a control character, if it could end up at the start of a line (by splitting the line into more lines). Can you suggest a better explanation? Maybe I should add after the sentence in parentheses: "by reflowing, reorganising, reformatting the source text." Extreme case: each word in a textual line is put in a separate line.