Re: Footnote line length ratio to current line length

[M Douglas McIlroy]

> How much fidelity to AT&T ms behavior do people expect from ms?  I've begun 
> to surmise that the answer is "a lot less than they expect from man(7) 
> documents".

Having a 40-year back catalog of -ms documents, I do care. Footnote
line length doesn't matter much from an aesthetic standpoint. In fact,
the short length  has always seemed strange. Unfortunately, though,
documents have often been tweaked to make nice fits to the pages. That
makes me leery of changes that could alter the line count on a page.
But not very leery if the symptom can be fixed by a single .FL.

As for man(7) documents, authors' macro usage and even the -man
package itself vary so much that I have no expectation that a
40-year-old man page will come out exactly right. But, hey, it's a
manual. It's the facts that matter, not the appearance. The facts
usually shine through the incompatibilities. And in extremis, you can
look at the source, which in the case of -man often exhibits
logorrhea, but rarely troff arcana.

Doug