On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 21:23:32 +0000 Keith Marshall <keith.d.marsh...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 03/11/14 20:16, Dale Snell wrote:
> > On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:36:04 +0000
> > Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> >> BTW, your mombog.mom had a blank line at the start and the comments
> >> were lines starting `\#' rather than `.\#'. One or the other might
> >> have an affect on your attempt at A3 in mom, I don't know.
> >
> > "\#" is a _groff_ comment,
>
> Yes, but it's explicitly a GNU troff extension to standard troff
> grammar; it may not produce the desired effect, were you to process
> your input through any other troff implementation.
True. I know it's a GNU extension, but I wasn't considering the
use of \# in a non-GNU [nt]roff. I suspect it would result in an
error message. I certainly hope so, anyway. My main observation
really was that ".\#" and "\#" are identical; there's no need to
prefer one over the other.
> The standard, and thus intrinsically portable, closest equivalent is
> `\"'; however, it is not entirely equivalent, since `\#' swallows the
> following newline, (at the end of the comment), whereas `\"' does not.
> (For a whole line comment, the portable equivalent to `\#' is `.\"').
>
> > not mom's. Mom shouldn't care. If she
> > does, she needs to be chastised, but I think she's safe. The only
> > time I use anything different is when I want an "in-line" comment.
> > E.g.,
> >
> > .MY_MACRO ARG ARG \" this is a silly example
>
> Here, you almost certainly don't want the comment to swallow the
> newline, so `\#' would surely be unsuitable. If you always use `\"'
> for comments, and always append them to lines which begin with a
> (maybe empty) request, you don't have to worry about the distinction.
Oh, definitely. I don't think I've ever used \# in the middle of
a line. I don't do that sort of thing very often anyway;
normally such comments go in the previous line.
> > As for the blank line at the top of the file, I don't think mom
> > cares. I just tried adding a blank line to one of my mom files, and
> > there was no change. Of course, I didn't have any PS or PDF images
> > in it, so it wasn't really a good test.
>
> In general, blank lines in troff input *are* significant; they induce
> a break, and introduce vertical white space in the output. At the
> start of a document, where space mode is inactive, you may not
> observe the effect, but relying on such quirks generally is
> inadvisable.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for the heads up. Almost
all of my *roffing is with Groff and mom, and there I almost
always set .blm to PP. So if I have a blank line, it's to start a
new paragraph. I do have the occasional foray into man, and I
generally don't set .blm then. For some reason, I've never stuck
blank lines in what raw troff I do have. Perhaps because all of
the examples I've seen never do it either. To be honest, I don't
do much with raw troff code, or macro sets other than mom and
maybe man, so I don't usually consider non-Groff situations.
BTW, out of my 'satiable curiosity, is mom being used by other
*roffs, or is it strictly Groff?
--Dale
--
"Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even
one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
-- J. Finnegan, USC.
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