[CCing groff list as it's also on-topic there, as troff history is to both lists]
At 2025-05-25T10:59:13-0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > I don't think I'd place that kind of faith in the LLM summary without > having a good read first. [...] At 2025-05-25T16:13:58-0400, Norman Wilson wrote: [...] > LLMs are not search engines. They are bullshit generators. I had a similarly bad experience with troff history and the AI-generated "answer" Google situated in prime visual real estate. This "AI Overview" claimed: "In troff, Brian Kernighan modified the text formatter to include a sentence space, which adds extra space between sentences. Specifically, if the sentence space is not set to zero, the second space after a potential end-of-sentence character (like ".", "?", or "!") will be treated as a sentence space, adding extra vertical spacing." My aggrieved rant, which some of my social media friends endured: "Jeeeesus Christ. I needed to look up some advice Kernighan wrote to troff users decades ago and I got a gout of lies sprayed directly into my face in an area where I might be able to call myself a domain expert. Be VERY VERY careful accepting any AI-generated results, people. This shit is ALMOST COMPLETELY WRONG. (It's correct about which punctuation marks [can] end a sentence...but you already knew that part, didn't you?) 1. Kernighan didn't innovate this. Ossanna troff (and nroff) already implemented end-of-sentence inference. 2. Configuration of inter-sentence spacing is a GNU troff extension, something else Kernighan had nothing to do with. Ossanna and Kernighan troffs permitted configuration of the inter-WORD space size with the `ss` request, but not the inter-SENTENCE space size. 3. Inter-sentence space is NOT VERTICAL. It's horizontal." Regards, Branden
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