On 2/5/18, Boss Hog <scotts.temp.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > The \| isn't truly a character, it simply instructs groff to pick up its > pen and move a few steps to the right. By using the .char request we may > create a virtual character to operate on.
Thank you, that was exactly what I needed. In fact, once you gave me the idea to wrap the horizontal movement in a .char request, I discovered I could assign even the \| escape in this manner, not needing to resort to the lower-level \h. This method seems like a little unnecessary overhead, but one advantage is that you can make different uses of the thin space context-dependent; that is, you can tell groff that \[Q_S] should be ignored in end-of-sentence detection, but other thin spaces (using \| directly, or a different .char definition) should not be. Not a practical consideration for me, since separating quotation marks is the only place I use it, but my inner programmer appreciates the semantic distinction.
