Re: [Groff] developers only?

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Wed Mar 30 21:01:52 2005, address@hidden wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 March 2005 7:49 pm, Otavio Exel wrote:
> > Otavio Exel wrote:
> > > How do I get groff to split but don't join?
> >
> > being a software developer myself, I must admit I've never had the
> > "guts" to try to understand groff macros; this was the first time and I
> > liked it (except for the mandatory leading dot, of course);
> 
> Why "of course"?  Placing a period in the first column on a line is a fairly 
> natural choice to discriminate between mark up code and running text -- in 
> English text at least, and presumably the majority of, if not all Western 
> European languages, it would be most unnatural to begin a line with a period, 
> or indeed any of the punctuation characters which normally appear only at the 
> end of sentences.

Well, if one interprets what Otavio says as "requests and macro
calls must be at the start of lines", it makes sense to me. It
.I is
a bit hard to swallow, if you come from e.g. a TeX background where
the markup doesn't disturb the flow of the text as much. People who have
complained about this include my hacker colleague, the UTP authors (IIRC)
and my kid brother
.ft CW
;-)

BR,
/Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <address@hidden>                                   -- Jonas