Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>, 2007-01-08 08:02 +0100:

> > Werner Lemberg wanted to know the status of \~.  I found 17 uses
> > within the groff documentation and 4 outside it.  Of those 4, two
> > were errors.  So it's not much needed for manual pages, which is a
> > good thing as it is not portable.  In particular, I was unable to
> > discover any corresponding ISO entity or Unicode character.
> 
> Both `\<SP>' and `\~' (and \0) are equivalent to &nbsp;

But they're different in that "\~" stretches while "\<SP>"
doesn't, right?

I have observed problems in some environments with display of
lines containing "\~" (which is why the DocBook manpages
stylesheet outputs "\<SP>" instead).

That doesn't have any ill effects as far as hypenation and
adjusting go, because I also have the stylesheet set up such that
in output from it, hyphenation is suppressed and text is adjusted
only to the left margin (because IMHO it's easier to read in
console output than text adjusted to both margins and hyphenated).

  --Mike