Re: [bug #64285] [troff] \D't' (set line thickness) drawing command alters drawing position

[Steve Izma]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 05:23:28PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Subject: [bug #64285] [troff] \D't' (set line thickness) drawing command
>  alters drawing position
> 
> Update of bug#64285 (group groff):
> ...
> > If you think fixing a crazy (but well known and documented)
> > "feature" is more important than maintaining 30 years of
> > groff compatibility,
> 
> I pretty much do, yeah.  Every crazy feature we keep dragging
> along with us makes the language harder to acquire, remember,
> and work with.  Where the size of the impacted user community
> is small, as it surely is here--I fear the most prolific users
> of drawing escape sequences outside of macro packages or
> preprocessors are cargo cultists--it seems an easy choice to
> make.

I agree that this should be fixed. But I can't imagine any
situation where the current behaviour can be considered a
feature. It's more likely that everyone using to the \Z'' fix is
doing so as a workaround and any such documents would be
unaffected by improving the \D't' behaviour.

I don't understand your reference to "cargo cultists". There are
scads of situations where one doesn't want to bother with macro
packages, e.g., one-page posters, flyers, announcements. I've
probably made hundreds of them with groff. Those are the kinds of
situations where one draws lots of lines and where this bug
becomes a nuisance.

The term "cargo cult" is almost always used in a pejorative way.
But I've been to Vanuatu and it's clear to me that the real
history of cargo cults is a history of anti-colonial movements
that engaged in communal, ritualized resistance, not so-called
superstition.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma@golden.net  cellphone: 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996