Speaking of the .ss section of the Texinfo manual, I'd like to get feedback on a change made here -- in particular, an example that illustrates a somewhat novel use of .ss to insert discardable horizontal space between individual notes in a block of footnotes.
Commit 866bc203 (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=866bc203) changed this example. The text introducing the example (taken from after the change, but applies equally to either version of the example) says: A related application of the 'ss' request is to insert discardable horizontal space; i.e., space that is discarded at a line break. For example, some footnote styles collect the notes into a single paragraph with large spaces between each. The example itself originally read: .ll 4.5i 1.\ This is the first footnote.\c .ss 48 .nop .ss 12 2.\ This is the second footnote. RESULT: 1. This is the first footnote. 2. This is the second footnote. The new version of this example is: .ie n .ll 50n .el .ll 2.75i .ss 12 48 1. J. Fict. Ch. Soc. 6 (2020), 3\[en]14. 2. Better known for other work. RESULT: 1. J. Fict. Ch. Soc. 6 (2020), 3-14. 2. Better known for other work. The new example really only demonstrates that you can set the sentence-space parameter of .ss to a large value to create a large space between sentences. I don;t think this is particularly illuminating; one could easily deduce that from the description of .ss. Its one bit of value-add is that it shows a use case -- separating footnotes -- that a user might not have otherwise thought of. However, the original example shows this as well, but also has additional attributes that the new example lacks: - It shows how to use .ss to insert extra (discardable) horizontal space without overriding its normal use to also separate sentences. That is, in the original example, one of the footnotes could have consisted of more than one sentence, and groff would use normal sentence spaces between sentences and extra-wide ones between footnotes. (Arguably, the example could be expanded to demonstrate this explicitly, but I think it's fairly deducible from the example as written.) The modified example does not have this property; any sentence breaks within a footnote would be given footnote-separating space. - It shows a use of the .nop request, whose description otherwise leaves users wondering what utility it has. - It shows that the second .ss parameter will take effect multiple times on the same output line. This may not seem particularly noteworthy, but it turns out to not be true of all roff implementations: http://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/issues/103 The footnote text in the retooled example does look like real footnotes, but this improvement could be easily retained while restoring the functionality of the original. In fact, the new footnote text could easily use sentence space within the footnotes, allowing the example to demonstrate word spaces, sentence space, and nonce footnote spaces within its two lines of output. What do you think?
