On 4/4/21, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, I agree that those are both desirable points to illustrate.
OK. I filed http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?60404 as a reminder. > The first is more economical, but the second is much more illustrative > of end of sentence detection and what, precisely, \c does. Maybe it > will suffice to have the latter only in the mailing list archives. Yeah, after ruminating another week, I still have no clear winner in my mind between these two or the original (.nop) formulation. I have a very slight preference for the .nop version because, as you note, it's tough to *explain* what .nop is good for, so the more practical illustrations of its use in the manual, the better. But you've offered good reasons for using your versions as well. > I have a bias against .nop at present because I don't know how to > explain it convincingly to people. "It's syntactic sugar for '.if 1'!" > feels feeble to me. I think that's perfectly fine as an explanation of what it *does*. But it sidesteps the obvious follow-up question, "Why you you ever need to say '.if 1'?" (An actual ".if 1" does have some utility, if you're in the development phase and want to try something different ways; changing ".if 1" to ".if 0" and vice versa is easier in some editors than repeatedly commenting and uncommenting a line. But using ".nop" in place of ".if 1" removes that benefit.) > As comprehensive at it is, there is much that is undocumented in CSTR > #54. The following were all true of Unix V7 troff. > > (1) .ss was honored only for typesetter output, i.e. "troff mode"; This is documented by the "T" in the "Notes" column. But yes, good observations on the other omissions. > Given the above, I conjecture that V7 .ss was used only in extremis, to > fix bad justification (to both margins) on a per-output-line basis. It > wasn't _useful_ for tweaking inter-sentence spacing, but applied to > every inter-word space on a line and therefore there would be no > _reason_ to change it within an output line. This makes sense, and I suppose could even be seen as a drawback to groff's implementation, in that this technique is harder to control if the .ss takes effect immediately rather than at the next typeset line break.
