Re: [Groff] rationale for italic correction mechanism?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> This reminds me of another question I'd wanted to ask about groff's
> italic-correction escapes.
>
> Why are these escapes something that a user must insert manually,
> rather than groff handling italic corrections automatically?

I think this is good old Unix philosophy...

> It is hard to imagine a case where the user would prefer that italic
> and Roman characters overlap at the transition.  And it seems to me
> that groff's default behavior ought to be to produce good
> typesetting, and require user intervention if the user wants ugly
> results, rather than the way it currently works, which is the exact
> opposite.

There is no conflict to groff's `inability' to apply it automatically.
What you really want is a *macro package* which does the job.  This is
exactly the same as with TeX and LaTeX: While TeX (the program)
doesn't apply italic correction automatically, there is LaTeX's \emph
command which does it.


    Werner