Hi Paul, > > The first occurrence of a component is used, > > e.g.\& .mh_profile's trumps $MHSHOW's. ... > is '\&' a hard space?
No, it's a non-printing, zero-width character. See 4.1 in Kernighan's http://troff.org/54.pdf. troff rightly believes in a bigger space at the end of a sentence than between words. :-) If troff sees the end of a sentence at the end of an *input* line then it treats it as if two spaces had been typed after it, i.e. The C Programming Language. The Unix Programming Environment. and The C Programming Language. The Unix Programming Environment. are equivalent. If the man page's source gets re-formated and `e.g.' ends up at the end of a line then an overly large space will appear after it. By writing it as `e.g.\&' I ensure the `.' will not appear at the end of an input line in the future and good practice when the `.' isn't the end of a sentence. > (for some reason i have it my head that the latin-isms ("i.e.", > "e.g.") should always be followed by a comma, but since i have no idea > where i learned that, and i don't think it was in school, it's > probably wrong.) I understand it's usual to follow e.g. or i.e. with a comma in the USA. It's a lot less common over here in England. :-) Cheers, Ralph. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
