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Re: [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index


From: Pierre-Jean
Subject: Re: [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2017 22:34:55 +0100
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Doug McIlroy <address@hidden> wrote:

> How does Utroff deal with even simple changes of line length, e.g. for
> flowing text around an image as in the following trivial example.
> A robust version that allows for intervening page or paragraph
> breaks would pose even more difficulty.
> 
>       .wh \n[nl]+3 `in +1.5i
>       .wh \n[nl]+3+2i `in -1.5i
>       Paragraph text here ...

I must first admit that, unfortunately, Utmac only has a very basic
picture management, since I never needed it myself. So, Utmac does
not deal at all with that situation.

And indeed, that example code would not work in Heirloom Troff.
Heirloom nonetheless provides the .pshape request to define the shape
of a paragraph adjusted "at once". Gunnar Ritter used that request to
draw a paragraph shaped like a circle. But when it comes to real life
situations, traps and line length adjustments are much more easy.
I tried to use the request to insert short notes within the body of a
pragraph (the text flowing around the note), but failed, and abandonned.

That is the kind of difficulty which is convincing me to give neatroff
a real try, and compare it with heirloom. I like the resulting
typographic grey of neatroff, but even if I would prefer heirloom's
one, I could be ready to switch to have a simpler interface to write
macros, since apparently, Neatroff's implementation of the paragraph
at once adjustment is much more transparent.


> Unjustified text is becoming quite common these days, presumably
> because the added shape of text helps the eye maintain vertical
> sync. I personally prefer it.

That seems to be an anglo-saxon habbit, since all examples I can think
about are architectural books written in english, or very short lines.
As a result, I did not give much attention to left align paragraphs.

> On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be
> like Knuth-Plass) does a worse job than nroff. Its scoring method
> has a significant chance of making a paragraph less uniform
> than nroff--perhaps because it isn't sufficiently "like
> Knuth-Plass". But it also has a habit that seems intrinsic
> to paragraphwise justification: each paragraph appears to
> have its own distinct line length. How does Utroff address
> this pitfall?

My feeling is that thanks to hyphenation and variable size spaces,
that pitfail would become much less visible, if visible at all, on a
pdf produced by heirloom troff. If it remains visible, and since
there's no "page at once" feature in heirloom, it could only be solved
by manual adjustment of interword space (.ss, .minss), and maybe by
adjusting lightly the size of the glyphes (.letadj), of the faulty
paragraphs in a page.

Kind regards,
Pierre-Jean.



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