Re: [Groff] Line-drawing escape

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> Is this a bug or a well-considered feature?

Apparently groff treats a space differently from "real" characters
(like in TeX, where a space in the input represents glue in the
output, not a printable character).

> Is there a way to save this structure?

Yes. Do a ".tr ~" before, and then use ~ as the line repetition
character.

By the way, using \N'32' (usually the space character) as the
repetition character works correctly with the ascii device but not
the postscript device, apparently because groff/grops treats the
remaining space put at the beginning of the repeated characters
(see the Troff User's Manual) as a "stretched" space using the
widthshow operator, then unfortunately also stretching the line
repetition space as well, so that the second word gets shifted
to well beyond the line length. (The ascii device doesn't bother
with fractions of a character cell width.) That the repetition
character is also a space seems to be correctly recognized when
using "~" translated to space on output.