Hi Branden,
Some drive-by comments from a quick skim.
> o New requests `soquiet` and `msoquiet` are available. They operate as
> `so` and `mso`, respectively, except that they do not emit a warning
> diagnostic if the file named in their argument does not exist.
Given the ‘file’ warning also controls this, AIUI, I wonder if it would
have been more orthogonal to have a new command to alter the warnings
for just what follows.
.warn -file so might-be-missing
.warn -el historicalmacro foo bar
> o nroff now supports spaces and tabs between option flag letters and
> option arguments, like groff and troff themselves.
I think that's trying to say
nroff -o 3,1,4
is now okay, i.e. the option's value can be a separate argument to the
option, but it reads to me that
nroff -o' 3,1,4'
will ignore the space. Having to mention spaces and tabs smells wrong.
> o The `PDFPIC` macro (provided by the `pdfpic` package) no longer aborts
> upon encountering trouble. Instead, it reports an error and abandons
> processing of its argument(s). It is also more sensitive to other
> kinds of problems and handles them the same way, by issuing a
> diagnostic and returning. If you wish `PDFPIC` to abort document
> processing immediately upon error, you can append an `ab` request to
> the package's error-handling macro.
>
> .am pdfpic@error
> . ab
> ..
>
> o The pspic package now also has an error hook macro, which you can use
> to make failed image loads fatal (or attempt fallback or recovery).
>
> .am pspic@error-hook
> . ab
> ..
Were those ‘.ab’ written with the lack of a default message in mind?
> o The new rfc1345 macro package, contributed by Dorai Sitaram, defines
> special character identifiers implementing RFC 1345 mnemonics (plus
> some additions from Vim, which itself uses RFC 1345 for its digraphs).
> It is documented in the groff_rfc1345(7) man page.
Mention ‘digraphs’ earlier and more prominently as that's their common
name.
> you should now write
> .MR ls 1 .
Is text to include in one's man-page preamble given which tests if .MR
is available and if not defines it? This would encourage .MR to be
used.
> The default is "b" (adjust lines to both margins) as has been
> the Unix man(7) default since 1979.
Probably just because it was showing off, similar to UNIX with small
caps. :-) It looks ugly.
> o On output devices using the Latin-1 character encoding ("groff -T
> latin1" and the X11 devices) the special character escape sequence
> \[oq] (opening quote) is now rendered as code point 0x27 (apostrophe)
> instead of 0x60 (grave accent). The ISO 8859/ECMA-94 Latin character
> sets do not define any glyphs for directional ("typographer's")
> quotation marks, but the apostrophe is depicted in the defining
> standard as a neutral (vertical) glyph, whereas the grave accent 0x60
> and acute accent 0xB4 are mirror-symmetric diacritical marks.
>
> This change has no effect on _input_ conventions for roff source
> documents. You can still get directional single quotes on UTF-8,
> PostScript, PDF, and other output devices supporting them by typing
> sequences like `this' in the input (character remapping with 'char'
> requests and similar notwithstanding).
-Tascii could do with a mention to place it in the Latin-1 or UTF-8
camp.
What's producing those funky ‘o’ bullet points? And the `hip`
backticks? Could UTF-8 be produced instead with • and ‘elegant’?
--
Cheers, Ralph.
