Follow-up Comment #15, bug #67363 (group groff): I missed part of Russ's reply. Here it is.
My main remaining concern about (4) is that it sounds like you're planning
on re-enabling hyphenation in the middle of the page. I am trying fairly
hard to turn off hyphenation since in my experience the results of
hyphenation are confusing and bad for technical documents. (Among other
things, the hyphens are easy to confuse with ASCII hyphen-minus and
interfere with cut and paste in some situations, and I also have no way of
knowing the language the page is written in and English hyphenation rules
may be completely wrong.) If the user really wants it and wants to
override the page, that is, of course, fine.
Do I also need to start doing something with the HY register in order to
set a preference for no hyphenation going forward?
> I'm uncertain how prominently I want to document the last fact. My own
> preference regarding man page authorship practices is that documents refrain
> from trying to manipulate these formatting parameters.
And of course my preference is that software intended for output in
terminals not use typesetting techniques like justification and
hyphenation that were designed for typeset pages with fine-grained control
over interword spacing and which, in the case of hyphenation, were
intended as input to a human process that adjusted the hyphenation rules
for the specific needs of that static layout of the document, something
that will never apply to man pages formatted on wildly varying devices
with wildly varying widths. But the art of living in a civilization is
finding useful compromises with people who don't realize that they're
wrong about everything they disagree with us on. :)
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