Follow-up Comment #2, bug #60404 (project groff): 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. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60404> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
