[Groff] "Cosmetic" filling

[Ted Harding]

Hi Folks,

A little query which I perhaps ought to know the
answer to ...

Suppose you have the last line of a paragraph, and
(formatted) it is nearly as long as the line-length.

Normally, such a line which is shorter then the
line-length would not be filled.

But it can be aesthetically pleasing to stretch it
slightly so as to really fill the line-length.

1. I'm not aware of a simple mechanism in groff to
   do this -- e.g. fill all lines whose minimum
   formatted length is within X of line-length.

2. Observation of some groff output suggests to
   me that groff may already do this (or maybe it
   was just a coincidence);[1] but if it does then I
   don't know how it does it nor how to control it.

There is the "\p" sequence which forces a particular
line to be stretched to fill, but this of course
requires micro-editing by the user (what's new? :).

[1] I have just written a 1-page document in which
I noticed that two standalone lines, as output, and
one final line of a paragraph, all seemed to exactly
fill the line-length. I verified this using a duplicate
of the lines terminated with "\p": at high magnification
in ghostview the two ends are at exactly the same
vertical position, to within ocular resolution!

Any comments?



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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
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Date: 29-Aug-06                                       Time: 23:18:40
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