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Re: [PATCH v2] Support 2-digit \sNN only in compatibility mode.


From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Support 2-digit \sNN only in compatibility mode.
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2020 02:45:48 +1000
User-agent: NeoMutt/20180716

At 2020-04-04T04:18:44-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> One issue in this patch:

At least.  There was also a duplicated word, "range", which I've now
fixed.  :)

[...]
> This correctly states that in normal mode, any single digit is now
> legal, but removes from the documentation the statement that in
> compatibility mode, the single digits 1-3 are disallowed (or rather,
> that they always signal a two-digit font size, making something such
> as "\s2tiny type" a syntax error).
> 
> Similarly, the ChangeLog entry states "only values in the range 10-39
> are handled specially," although in fact the single digits 1-3 are
> also handled specially.

Yup.  It's terser and makes more sense to just document 4-39 as the
supported range.

> One issue that has apparently existed in doc/groff.texi since time
> immemorial (and should perhaps be a separate patch, since it's
> independent of this change):

Yeah, I can do that as a separate commit, but as it's not
behavior-changing I'll bypass the discussion list.

> The \s[NNN] form is completely undocumented in the \s section.

The example just after the presentation of the syntax \s forms implies
its existence:

        Note that @code{\s} doesn't produce an input token in
        @code{gtroff}.  As a consequence, it can be used in requests
        like @code{mc} (which expects a single character as an argument)
        to change the font on the fly:

        @Example
        .mc \s[20]x\s[0]
        @endExample

And then right after that, we're pointed to documentation for both of
the delimited forms of the \s escape:

        @xref{Fractional Type Sizes}, for yet another syntactical form
        of using the @code{\s} escape.  @endDefreq

But I overlooked this too until now.  I don't want to duplicate
information, but I think I'd make "syntactical form" plural (a
user-specified delimiter has to pair with itself, whereas groff handles
'[' and ']' specially), swap the order of these paragraphs, and
explicitly note that those forms are not limited to fractional sizes.

It is slightly unfortunate that there's a page break right after the big
list of traditional \s forms, which could seduce the reader to stop
reading at that point.

Thanks for pointing these issues out!

Regards,
Branden

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