gbranden pushed a commit to branch master
in repository groff.
commit 87b17c265033d5de5cf215a4b3c994fe9d72efdb
Author: G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]>
AuthorDate: Wed Jan 7 06:33:05 2026 -0600
doc/groff.texi.in: Revise "Text" section.
Style:
* Favor present tense over future.
Markup:
* Add anchor for "text line" definition, as referring to the containing
subsection draws hyperlinks to the wrong page. Finagle its location
to work around apparent Texinfo tomfoolery. TeX's Knuth-Plass
breaking/adjustment algorithm, shrilly celebrated by all critics of
*roff, does the system no favors here. If you set a Texinfo anchor at
the beginning of a paragraph and TeX decides to bump that entire
paragraph to the next page for beauty, links to that anchor go
uselessly to the bottom of the page preceding the text of interest.
*roff can have problems like this, too (which some macro packages
exacerbate by demanding 2 vees for _every_ pargraph no matter how
short), but they're less frequent and less severe since, without user
intervention involving the `ne` request, *roff sets only a line at a
time, so a page breaking decision made 3 or 4 output lines into a
paragraph can't reach backward in the text to screw up your hyperlink
anchors. Internet partisans who do much more forum posting than
technical writing think of Knuth-Plass as occupying some optimal
position in the text formatting domain. It doesn't. It's an
engineering technique that involves tradeoffs. Knuth-Plass is good at
some things and less good at others. The same goes for *roff.
---
doc/groff.texi.in | 8 +++++---
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/doc/groff.texi.in b/doc/groff.texi.in
index 0dcb04670..d924f2862 100644
--- a/doc/groff.texi.in
+++ b/doc/groff.texi.in
@@ -5710,7 +5710,7 @@ T.\& Barnum.
Adding text caused our input to wrap; now, we don't need @code{\&} after
@samp{T.} but we do after @samp{P.}. Consistent use of the escape
sequence ensures that potential sentence boundaries are robust to
-editing activities. Further advice along these lines will follow in
+editing activities. Further advice along these lines follows in
@ref{Input Conventions}.
@cindex end-of-sentence transparent characters
@@ -5888,8 +5888,7 @@ are output at the beginning of the next line without being
@emph{adjusted} (see below); however, this behavior can be modified
(@pxref{Leading Space Traps}). Again, macro packages may provide other
methods of producing indented paragraphs. Trailing spaces on text lines
-are discarded.@footnote{``Text lines'' are defined in @ref{Requests and
-Macros}.}
+are discarded.@footnote{@xref{text lines}.}
What if the file ends before enough words have been collected
to fill an output line?
@@ -5997,6 +5996,9 @@ with the dummy character escape sequence,
@cindex control line
An input line beginning with a control character is called a
+@c XXX: We place the anchor a little early because otherwise the PDF
+@c Texinfo generates navigates to a position _past_ that of interest.
+@anchor{text lines}
@dfn{control line}.
@cindex text line
Every line of input that is not a control line is a
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