URL:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55124>
Summary: doc/groff.texi: text about negative .pl values needs
clarification
Project: GNU troff
Submitted by: barx
Submitted on: Wed 28 Nov 2018 09:13:30 AM CST
Category: Core
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: Documentation
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Details:
Part of the .pl section of the info manual states:
Negative @code{pl} values are possible also, but not very useful: No trap is
sprung, and each line is output on a single page
This contains a couple of ambiguities:
(1) "No trap is sprung": This wording makes it sound like this is referring to
a specific trap; otherwise, it would say "no traps are sprung," or "no traps
of type (x) are sprung." But no specific trap is mentioned in this section.
The paragraph before refers to traps in a general sense for setting top and
bottom margins; these are usually page-location traps, which indeed are not
sprung with negative .pl values. But input line traps, for example, _are_
sprung. I haven't comprehensively tested which types of traps are sprung and
which aren't, so I don't yet have a suggested replacement wording.
(2) "each line is output on a single page": This could be read two different
ways: all output is on a single, unending page; or each line of output starts
a new page. The second is what actually happens (which is an odd choice, as
the first would be useful for TTY output, while it's hard to imagine a
real-world use for the second--a fact the documentation even acknowledges by
calling the behavior "not very useful"), so the wording should say this more
unambiguously.
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