On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 03:00:45PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > 2. addressed in documentation on master (NEWS) prior to RC4 > (f9e84954174); reporter remains unhappy, but does not respond to > requests for more precise information
I guess the technical details should be well understood by now and are pretty obvious anyway. A simple test case has been posted in https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-04/msg00137.html together with the output from groff 1.22.4 and 1.23.0.rc4 that shows a significant difference in vertical spacing. In https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-04/msg00097.html it has been pointed out how these changes affect the formatting of "Typesetting Mathematics - User's Guide (Second Edition)" by Kernighan and Cherry with 1.23.0.rc4 and where 1.23.0.rc4 now shows formatting differences that weren't there with 1.22.4. As a bonus I should maybe also mention that even the ms.ms document is (in my view, negatively) affected by these changes (and not just because of the .bp request) - compare the vertical space before "5.3 Paragraphs" with the vertical space before "5.8 Keeps, boxed keeps, and displays". There is also surprisingly little vertical space before "8.2. Berkeley ms accent mark and glyph strings" (when there is a lot more vertical space before "8.1. AT&T ms accent mark strings"). That's all visible in https://www.dropbox.com/sh/17ftu3z31couf07/AAC_9kq0ZA-Ra2ZhmZFWlLuva?preview=ms.2023-04-17.pdf This should all be seen in the context of the Groff Mission Statement: "Backward compatibility with existing documents and usage will remain a top priority, as will avoiding feature-bloat and increased overheads." When there are these formatting differences even in its own documentation, there really isn't much value in a promise of "backward compatibility". commits responsible for all these changes: 3061f20f53e3616a8577fd2ecce1b068d0d66dd4 and 783f3c2745b8132a9b7fa99bd1b241d2e34f4398 BTW, the NEWS entry doesn't mention ".TE" and also doesn't mention that pre-heading space is then also omitted (which is actually the most obvious/annoying difference). And while we are at it - what about ".PE"? And in documents where PD is significantly larger than DD, why would I only want DD spacing? If accumulation of DD+PD spacing is too big, maybe just using the maximum of DD and PD would be the more desirable option? And yes, maybe next week I'll notice more differences/regression in other documents... (I just haven't looked at any other documents yet) Christof -- https://cmeerw.org sip:cmeerw at cmeerw.org mailto:cmeerw at cmeerw.org xmpp:cmeerw at cmeerw.org