At 2026-09-10T23:20:00-0400, Larry Kollar wrote: > G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > > […] > > Consequently, the only truly reliable way to strip a *roff document > > of all formatting is, funnily enough...to format it with *roff. > > I’ve come to the same conclusion.
I was surprised that Jeff was surprised that this wasn't common knowledge. Even in workplaces filled with software engineers, most places I've been the phrase "statically deterministic behavior" would draw more blank stares than comprehending ones. > > As I have said before,[2] "groff -a" does what "deroff" and "unroff" > > programs do, does it better, and is very close to what users of such > > tools want anyway. > > I somehow didn’t see this when you sent it two days ago, but maybe > that was for the best. I've recently noticed list traffic occasionally failing to hit my inbox as well. I assume that GMail is deliberately further enshittifying itself to drive people like me away from the platform. > I might have done most of the same things I did, but I’d have had to > pipe output through awk to fix that “<hy>” issue. Yeah, that's another point that needs decision or a configuration knob when tackling any revision of the `-a` feature, or its expansion into a parameterized `-A` option.[1] I think some people are going to strongly desire to see "hard" hyphens distinguished from ones that automatic hyphenation injected, and some strongly are going to NOT want them distinguished. Here's the configuration space as I currently model it. 1. report page breaks 2. distinguish "automatic" hyphens from explicit ones 3. promote explicit hyphens to notation for `hy` special character 4. develop a (discardable) notation for indexed characters[2] 5. develop a (discardable) notation for drawing commands 6. develop a (discardable) notation for device extension commands At present, I think of all of these as toggles. But that's still 2^6 = 64 possible configurations. No way am I devising a bit vector that people have to learn for this. That method is archaic. `hy` and `warn` are anti-patterns.[3][4] Regards, Branden [1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66242 [2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67817 [3] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55070 [4] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68242
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