At 2023-11-21T12:02:20+0300, Anton Shepelev wrote: > Jim Hall: > > > Several weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Marshall Kirk > > McKusick about how he writes his books using groff: > > https://technicallywewrite.com/2023/10/13/groffbooks > > McKusick writes about orphan elimination, end-of- > line tweaking, and balancing of text on facing > pages. Does that mean he wrote an exptermal tool > that looks for those defects and runs *roff in sev- > eral passes to eliminate them? It seems in possible > in a single *roff invocation...
I think it's possible he simply fixed these issues manually. I engage is such a process to avoid stranded with lines by using what I call "poor man's keeps" in groff's man pages. But this is just a guess; if you (or anyone else) would like to reach out and ask him, I'd love to know the answer. I'm personally delighted with Jim's recent interviews because they confirm that Kernighan and McKusick are both groff users. I seem to remember people on the TUHS mailing list expressing skepticism that luminaries like these stooped to the usage of GNU troff, instead preferring the completely satisfactory (if utterly unmaintained) AT&T troffs of the 1980s and 1990s. Regards, Branden
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