Re: How to configure how groff hyphenates man pages (was: tctest.1 man page hyphenation comments)

[G. Branden Robinson]

[self-follow-up]

At 2024-06-03T21:05:48-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> groff(7):
> 
>      8      disables hyphenation after the first two characters of a
>             word.

Come to think of it, what you probably want is hyphenation mode 12, the
_sum_ of 8 and 4.  And if you don't want a word hyphenated before page
breaks and similar (not a concern with modern formatters for terminals
that contrive "infinite page length" for man pages), then what you want
is mode 14, which brings us back to AT&T man(7)'s default.  ;-)

So, try

.hy 12 \" or 14

in your man.local file.

>> I was probably also grumbling about nroff hyphenating "error" and
>> "Repeat", i.e.,
>>         "er-" "ror"
>>         "Re-" "peat"
>> It also split
>>         "parameters" as "pa-" "rameters"
>>         "obsolete" as "ob-" "solete"
>>         "default" as "de-" "fault"

Recalling the script from my previous mail, we can demonstrate how this
would work out in practice.

$ HY=12 hyphen error repeat parameters obsolete default
error
repeat
para‐me‐ters
obso‐lete
default

Better?

Regards,
Branden

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