> What do folks think?
I would add that where \s[nnn] is legal it would be the preferred syntax.
It is what I use all the time, even for \s[9] . Unambiguous.
Witness in groff:
.sp 8
.ps 8
\ .ps 8 \s10 10 \s40 40 \s(20 20 \s[40] 40 \s[120] 120
attachment:
witness.png
Mike
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 12:32:04PM +1100, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2020-03-30T19:16:56-0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > Does anyone else see the following behavior?
> > Version 1.22.4 handles \s correctly up to \s39, but
> > truncates a size of 40 or greater to its first
> > digit. Here are two screen shots, with ^D edited in
> > to show where input ends and output begins.
>
> Hi Doug!
>
> This appears to be for backward compatibility. The 1992 revision of
> CSTR #54 says in �2.3:
>
> "Note that through an accident of history, a construction like \s39 is
> parsed as size 39, and thus converted to size 36 (given the sizes
> above), while \s40 is parsed as size 4 followed by 0. The syntax \s(nn
> and \s�(nn permits specification of sizes that would otherwise be
> ambiguous."
>
> As Robert Thorsby noted, this is documented in the groff Texinfo manual;
> however, it is not noted in the groff(7) man page, something I'm
> inclined to fix in the near term.
>
> To the broader group, I would furthermore suggest that, being GNU roff,
> it might behoove us to preserve the above "accident of history" only in
> compatibility mode, and have the \sn form accept only a single-digit
> argument for consistency with other escape forms. Doug still would have
> gotten into trouble, but it would have been a more easily understood
> trouble.
>
> What do folks think?
>
> Regards,
> Branden
--
Mike Bianchi
Foveal Systems
973 822-2085
mbian...@foveal.com
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