On 22/04/14 20:40, Peter Schaffter wrote: > On Tue, Apr 22, 2014, Ulrich Lauther wrote: >> Well of course not. A paragraph ends, e.g. when an empty line is >> seen. Probably there are a whole lot of other conditions. My >> understanding is that formatting takes place after macros have >> been expanded; at the macro level it would be easier. So could >> the macros issue some hint (in form of a pseudo comment) when they >> realize that a paragraph has ended? > > Signalling the end of collected paragraphs can't be done exclusively > within macros because, unlike SGMLs, paragraph macros in groff > generally aren't closed.
Doesn't a paragraph logically conclude at any request which introduces a break? Or invocation of any macro which itself invokes such a request? (In addition to an empty input line, or one with leading white space, which implies a break?) All of these exhibit one common feature: the introduction of the break. > That means that every macro introducing a new semantic element would > have to test, at the start of the macro definition, whether paragraph > collecting is currently taking place, and bring it to an end so the > paragraph can be formatted. While that would work in a lot of cases, > I think the better strategy would be to implement two requests, say > .pb and .pe, usable within macro definitions, but also available > on-the-fly in cases where the user needs to specify the block of text > that constitutes a paragraph. Of course, in the interests of semantic markup, it may be useful to have a macro which would explicitly mark the end of a paragraph, but would such a macro not be a semantic element of the particular macro package which provides it? -- Regards, Keith.
