Ha! Glad I'm not the only one who is driven up the wall by newlines at the end of every sentence. I've heard this policy touted so many times by folk who are obviously expert (even those who don't troff), and I have no doubt at all it works for them.
I just can't read or edit it to save my life. L*rd knows I've tried. --d On Saturday, December 19, 2020, 01:17:02 PM EST, Peter Schaffter <pe...@schaffter.ca> wrote: On Sat, Dec 19, 2020, Ulrich Lauther wrote: > On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 10:27:01AM +0000, Dorai Sitaram wrote: > > groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after > > sentence-ending punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source > > line. > > In my opinion it is good style to start every sentence on a new > source line. A piece of advice I have been happily ignoring since sometime back in the 90s. Certain kinds of texts (scientific, technical) and the ways they are to be used (e.g. one off, or formatted for multiple media types and platforms) undeniably benefit from it. But I simply cannot compose a work of fiction, or an article, or a rewiew one screen line at a time. It is not how one reads (at least not those of us who grew up reading ink on dead trees), and significantly interferes with one's ability to assess the meaning and flow of the text. This is the the first paragraph of _Bleak House_ typed one screen line at a time, no wrap: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. I can't even read the whole text because half of it is off-screen! Moreover, if I turn wrapping on, the last sentence alone takes up six lines on an 80-col terminal and would be hell to edit for those of us who use 'k' and 'j' to navigate up and down in vi since a single 'j' moves the cursor six lines down--generally not what you expect. Wrap conflates 'k' and 'j' with '('and ')'. In other words, 'k' and 'j' effectively become sentence navigation commands instead of screen movement commands. This represents a significant loss of editing functionality. Here's the same paragraph, 72 characters per line, automatic wrap. "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest." I can see all the text, my head doesn't have to swivel like at a tennis match to read from left to right, and I can grasp the overall effectiveness of the paragraph in a few seconds. I can, furthermore, navigate up and down in the text in the expected manner in addition to jumping from sentence to sentence if I wish. Since groff imposes no requirement that each sentence be a unique source line, I see no reason even to suggest it to (new) users as good style, except as a useful, and perhaps at times required, strategy for collaborative/multiplatfom/multimedia documents. Furthermore, since groff treats end of sentence characters followed by one space, two spaces, or newlines identically when sentence spacing is disabled (as it is by default), the issue of whether to enter monospaced input with one or two spaces between sentences is moot. Either can be used. I prefer two because even in proportional font typesetting, readability is improved by the space between sentences being fractionally larger than the space between words; two spaces is how you tell groff to use sentence spacing when you're not doing sentence-by-line input. Plus I'm scared that the ghost of my highschool typing teacher is going to whack me with his pointer for not double-spacing sentences. -- Peter Schaffter https://www.schaffter.ca