Follow-up Comment #12, bug #64018 (project groff):
[comment #10 comment #10:]
> Merely ugly.
[...]
> Very ugly though ;-)
Wow, you're not kidding. That's pretty awful. But given that the change in
indentation amount is all it took to produce this yuckiness, I would think
there have to be synopses that would be just as horrid with a base paragraph
indentation of 5n.
Possibly, _mdoc_(7) page authors knew this and carefully edited the ones that
did, so that now no one sees them. But they would have be de-semanticizing
their inputs by sweating formatting details. Perhaps Ingo will join me in
finding that dubious, even if he hates the changed indentation (which I aim to
change back, and port over to _groff man_(7), in case that wasn't clear).
> These are all with standard 80 columns.
>
> Sorry, I don’t have a guide… most of the time, it’s the nine-argument
limit (sometimes eight, but I fixed some of these cases), and more rarely
converting \[xx] to \(xx.
Understood.
> There is also an issue with where \& should be placed, which also affects
J�rg Schilling’s systems. We figured out that putting \& after punctuation
*only* for stuff like “e.g.\&” (where you don’t want the american
double-spacing after), and otherwise before (e.g. “\&.” or “\&xx”
where xx is a request name) works best.
I assume you mean `\&.xx` in that last example.
And yes, those two applications have always been intended and expected.
_groff_man_style_(7) says:
\& Dummy character. Insert at the beginning of an input line to
prevent a dot or apostrophe from being interpreted as beginning
a roff control line. Append to an end‐of‐sentence punctuation
sequence to keep it from being recognized as such.
The [https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/ groff manual] says more.
I remember Joerg well. If you have any exhibits of *_roff_ input that he
insisted was correct, all other implementations be damned, I'd be curious to
see them.
> I did add some of the new features to my tmac, like .In to mdoc(7) and the
Xr-like .MR to man(7).
Interesting. I did not know `In` was a late-breaking macro in the _mdoc_(7)
world. I (feel that I) have a good grasp of _man_'s history, and a poor one
of _mdoc_'s.
> We cannot, obviously, have three-letter requests.
Nope. Like I said, there's room for `Cq`, `Co`, and `Cc`.
Thanks for following up!
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