On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 06:51:51PM +0200, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote: > Subject: Re: *roff hyphenation trivia challenge
> For "antidisestablishmen\%tarianism", groff prints > > antidisestablishmen- > tar- > i- > an- > ism > > (which I think is strange), while TeX and Heirloom troff print > > antidisestablishmen- > tarianism > > which I think is the only reasonable way of handling this case. I disagree. I prefer groff's behaviour because I don't ever want correct hyphenation points to be ignored. Using \% is almost always a correction to the hyphenation logic. If I'm typesetting a book, corrections to a paragraph can happen at any time up to the final delivery of the files for printing. Even a single-letter correction in a paragraph can change the line breaks and make the corrected hyphenation unnecessary and inappropriate. In that case I don't want to have to go around searching for hyphenation corrections in order to revert to a greater choice of hyphenation points. However, that means that the above example removes correct hyphenation points before the added correction. If a bug is going to be fixed, I suggest that the correct points on both sides of the \% should be retained. Also for \% at the beginning of a word, I rarely use this. If I don't want a word hyphenated at all, then it's likely that I don't want it hyphenated anywhere in the document. And in such cases I would add .hw antidisestablishmentarianism to the document once (or, preferably, to a local tmac file used for the project). This may not be important for man page authors, but it's very important in a production environment. -- Steve -- Steve Izma - Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2H 1W6 E-mail: si...@golden.net cellphone: 519-998-2684 == The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question. -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin*, 1996