bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #60404, doc/groff.texi: update/restore .ss...

 
 

bug #60404: doc/groff.texi: update/restore .ss example

Submitter:  Dave <barx>
Submitted:  Fri 16 Apr 2021 09:12:38 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Core Severity:  1 - Wish
Item Group:  Documentation Status:  Fixed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  gbranden
Open/Closed:  Closed Planned Release:  1.23.0
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Tue 25 May 2021 12:58:18 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Thanks!  I think it covers everything we talked about in our email discussion.  And it goes beyond the original example by illustrating regular word spaces, regular sentence spaces, and super-sized sentence spaces all in the same small block.  It avoids both .nop and any tricky use of \c.  It seems a pretty clear win.

But...

The original example did implement the pretty useful concept of "insert a wide discardable space right here without changing any settings in the surrounding text."  I incorporated this into a macro of my own:


.de discardable-space
\c
.nr saved-ss \\n[.ss]
.ss 2*\\n[saved-ss]
.nop
.ss \\n[saved-ss]
.rr saved-ss
..


I wouldn't have been able to write this at all without the original info-manual example, and I'm not convinced I could do it that easily from the retooled one.  (The hackish use of .nop isn't strictly necessary, as the macro works as well with an empty line there instead, but I've retained .nop as a sort of "this line intentionally left blank" marker.)

But it's fair to say that the point of this example in the manual should be the novel use of .ss to insert a wide discardable space, which it shows quite well; and that what the original example illustrated was a specific interaction of .ss and .nop, which is maybe less a job for the official manual than for the useful-roff-tricks repository I wished for (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-05/msg00059.html).  And since (as I also said) the email list archive essentially fulfills that role, and I did paste the entire original example into the email that started the threads referenced in comment #0, probably that's good enough.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Mon 24 May 2021 05:10:55 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Let me know if this doesn't quite do it, Dave, and I'll reopen (or you can feel free to).

I couldn't contrive a reason to put the .nop back in there, as Doug wished for, but I tried to make up for that by revising the actual .nop description extensively and providing an example there (in another commit).


commit f1f16e8708c639be8f18ff42af8ba4756de0dae5
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue May 25 02:56:04 2021 +1000

    Fix Savannah #60404.

    * doc/groff.texi (Manipulating Filling and Adjustment): Update
      inter-sentence space example to be more illustrative.  Thanks to Dave
      Kemper and Doug McIlroy for the discussion.

    Fixes <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?60404>.


G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Fri 16 Apr 2021 09:12:38 PM UTC, original submission:  

Discussion (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-03/msg00030.html and following thread; http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-04/msg00005.html and following thread) seems to have converged on the idea that the original (pre-866bc203) .ss example has aspects that are worth retaining.  This could be done by restoring the original example, restoring a modified version of the original, or retooling the new example.

Dave <barx>
Group Member

 

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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2021-05-24 gbranden StatusNone Fixed
        Assigned toNone gbranden
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
        Planned ReleaseNone 1.23.0

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