I'm not Robert, but... At 2024-01-10T15:28:01+0100, Alexis wrote: > But neither seem to provide an explanation as to why .lt defaults to > 6.5i and should be kept that way.
It's for the same reason that the line length for everything except
titles defaults to 6.5i--that value works fine for portrait U.S. letter
paper (the original AT&T troff default paper format), and *generally*
people want the same line length for titles as for running text.
While I don't think it's crazy to change papersize.tmac to sync the
title line length with the overall line length, this is a really tedious
point to deal with (meaning: we'll want regression tests) because macro
packages adopt two conflicting strategies to configure these things.
1. Some packages, like mm, man(7), and mdoc, expect you to configure
page/line-dimensioning registers before loading the macro package.
2. Others, like ms and (IIRC) me(7), instead expect you to set
appropriate registers at the top of the document to achieve this.
Preloading their registers either gets ignored or results in
incorrect values.
3. Most macro packages don't expose a register for configuring the
title line length in particular anyway. man(7) (and, as of groff
1.23.0, mdoc(7)), unusually, do.
4. I can't speak to mom(7) at all.
So it's a mess.
Regards,
Branden
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