[bug #54101] documentation for .ss either incorrect or incomplete

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #54101 (project groff):

[comment #12 comment #12:]
> The question I have is, should extra space be distributed in
> keeping with the relative proportion of additional
> intersentence space to interword space?
> 
> That's more of a typography question than a code question.
> One of us can take it to the list, I reckon.

Indeed, the answer isn't clear.  According to this ranting but well-documented
blog post
<http://web.archive.org/web/20171217060354/http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324>,
professional typography stopped using extra sentence spacing between the 1920s
and the 1950s, breaking with two centuries of nearly universal typographic
practice.  Ideally, groff would adjust sentence spaces in line with that
historical practice, but finding someone familiar with such details may
require casting the net wider than the groff email list.

This blog post states, "the aesthetics of how to handle the various width
spaces... had complex rules that can be found in many of the manuals cited
above," a vagueness that makes sense given that the question of adjusting is
beyond its scope.  But it does quote a passage from the 1906 Chicago Manual of
Style with some Byzantine (and, to my modern eyes, not entirely
comprehensible) rules for adjusting a line, wherein space is added or removed
depending on the shapes of the adjacent characters, among other
considerations.  This is probably not only inadvisable in modern groff (it
concerns a typesetting paradigm where other marks of punctuation also got
something other than a standard word space after them), but not even possible,
as I don't think groff has any awareness of letter shapes (else why would user
intervention be required to avoid a collision between an italic f and a roman
end parenthesis?).

But it seems to me that groff's current system is not ideal.  Your example
from comment #4 probably illustrates this best, showing that with large
adjustments, spaces between words and those between sentences become nigh
indistinguishable, surely not the desired outcome when the user has asked for
sentence spaces to be two to four times the width of word spaces.

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