Re: [Groff] End-of-line whitespace.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Kristaps,

> Are there any concrete reasons for avoiding trailing eoln whitespace
> in roff files (specifically -man and/or -mdoc)?  These are stripped
> from input anyway "foo    " followed by "bar" outputs "foo bar", so
> I'm hard up for providing a reason beyond "Do It".

It's generally a good idea in all text files since it isn't obvious to
the reader it's present and may sometimes have significance.  In troff,
end-of-line whitespace is significant.

    $ cat -A eolspc.tr
    .ds s foo $
    "\*s"$
    $ nroff eolspc.tr | grep .
    "foo "
    $ 

Here, GNU cat's -A option is appending `$' to the end of the lines,
showing `foo' on the first line of eolspc.tr has a trailing space.  That
makes it into the definition of string `s' as can be see in the output
of nroff.

Cheers,
Ralph.