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Re: [Groff] Re: Readability of troff documents


From: Giorgos Magos
Subject: Re: [Groff] Re: Readability of troff documents
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 12:54:36 +0300

> Agreed!! This was a question I remember discussing with
> Werner a long time ago! There are several useful
> candidates for an extended "ligature" set, such as
> 
>   ``  ''   for opening and closing quotes --  ---  for en
>   and em dashes (as in the current thread)

At least `' seems to work for single quotes, which is quite
nice. I'd hate to have to type \(oq and \(cq! Interesting, I
hadn't thought of this concept as related to ligatures, but,
of course, it is the same thing as far as groff is
concerned.

> and different users can think of ones they would specially
> like. So ideally "ligatures" should not be hard-wired as
> they are now, but user-definable/selectable; and this is
> definitely not trivial!

I like this idea, but definitely not trivial!

> A compromise, which does somewhat improve readibility, is
> to use the \[..] syntax instead of \(.. -- to my eyes at
> least it is much easier to see what is happening (see
> below). As so often, the ".char" command is most useful
> here, as in
> 
> .char \[--] \(em

I agree, both \[--] and \[em] are infinitely better than
\(em, but -- (or ---) is best ;-)

-- Giorgos

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