Hi Deri, On Fri Nov 21, 2025 at 10:38 PM CET, Deri wrote: > On Friday, 21 November 2025 20:14:31 GMT onf wrote: > [...] > > Nice! > > > > However, \D'r' produces rectangles with round edges (like its \D'p' > > counterpart). Is that what we want? \D'R' is described as drawing a > > "rule", which I interpret as a filled rectangle with sharp edges. One > > disadvantage of it being filled is that the lines have a thickness of > > zero and thus one needs to know the default line thickness (0.04m) to > > emulate a sharp-edged \D'l 1m 0'. \D'r' does not suffer from this issue > > as its lines aren't zero width, meaning that \D'r 1m 0' is equivalent to > > \D'l 1m 0'. But the fact that it has round edges also prevents it from > > being useful for drawing rules since, as noted above, rules should have > > sharp edges. > [...] > The grops man page hints at the solution to this, the simplest solution is to > use:- > > \X'ps: exec 0 setlinejoin 0 setlinecap'\c > > which works for both grops and gropdf.
I am well aware of the existence of these PostScript/PDF commands. However, this solution is device-specific. The problem is that there is no device-independent way to draw a proper rule. I was suggesting breaking the precedent of unfilled objects having round edges to make \D'r' work as a proper, simple to use, device-independent rule. I realize introducing such inconsistency isn't great, but at least there would finally be a way of drawing a rule without ending up with gaps (old \l) or round edges (\D'l'). Cheers, onf
