On 4/27/23, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcil...@dartmouth.edu> wrote: > "Semantic newline" warnings are relatively innocuous. The occasional > pitch on this mailing list for paragraph awareness is far less so.
If you're referring here to changing groff's line-by-line processing to paragraph-at-once processing (via Knuth-Plass or similar algorithm), that's a central part of groff's 2014 mission statement (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html, where it's billed as an "exciting challenge") and had widespread support when the mission statement was being assembled some 10 years ago. I agree with your rant about software that tries to second-guess what the user wants: I too find this more often infuriating than helpful. But groff is already making decisions about how to reflow your input text. (If you didn't want it to make those decisions for you, you'd sprinkle your prose with .brp requests telling it exactly where you wanted every line to break.) All this proposal is about is letting it make BETTER decisions about line-break placement, by taking a wider view of the same input. If you're referring to some other occasional pitch, then disregard the above. :)