Re: Leaders

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Lennart,

At 2023-09-02T22:35:25+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> No, there aren’t.   Your message does not contain the SOH bytes;  you
> could as well put replacement “^A”s there.

I was attempting to suggest their presence.

> The point is that the width of the line of periods is determined by
> its position on the input line.

Yes, that's...what I guess we call "non-line-tabs mode".  Someone who
hasn't posted here in a while suggested that we don't need names for
modes like that, even (or especially?) when they're the default.

> That is confusing, yet it also doesn’t usually matter:  You seldom use
> tabs or leaders in filled text.

Even if that is the case, we should explicitly specify the behavior, and
document it in a way that is comprehensible to users.

I challenge you to explain the following.

$ cat EXPERIMENTS/long-leader2.roff
.ds ld \a\"
.ta \n(.lu
.nf
.\" The default line length is 65n.
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
.fi
The mansion into which my Val had ventured to make forcible
entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded\*(ld
.sp
The mansion into which my Val had ventured to make forcible en-
trance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded\*(ld
.sp
entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded\*(ld
$ nroff EXPERIMENTS/long-leader2.roff | cat -s
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
The  mansion  into which my Val had ventured to make forcible en‐
trance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded....

The mansion into which my Val had ventured to make  forcible  en‐
trance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded........

entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded.......


At least one of those must be wrong, don't you think?

Regards,
Branden

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