Re: [ms] Footnote line length ratio to current line length

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Kurt!

At 2020-12-09T10:52:47-0500, T. Kurt Bond wrote:
> Took a look at the output of Heirloom troff and Plan9 troff in
> Plan9port <https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/>, and *they* both have
> the 11/12 ratio.  In both, the IZ initialization macro does
> 
> .if !\\n(FL .nr FL \\n(LLu*11u/12u
> 
> And the MC macro (2C just calls MC) sets FL to 11/12 of the width of
> the column.
> 
> Any idea where I could find the source for earlier versions of the ms
> macros?

Sure thing.  One of the resources I've used while updating Larry
Kollar's ms.ms document as discussed earlier on this list is the
archives of the Unix Heritage Society (TUHS).  They have many historical
Unix implementations, often including macro package sources.  Two
valuable documents are the V6 and V7 Unix ms implementations.

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/lib/tmac.s
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.s

DWB (Documenter's Work Bench) 3.3, which I _think_ is the
open-sourced-and-thrown-over-the-wall baseline from which Gunnar Ritter
started developing Heirloom Doctools, is also a useful reference.

https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/macros/ms/tmac.s.sr

The 11/12ths FL ratio is common to all of these.

Given the tenor of recent discussion, I'm wondering if we should just go
ahead and change groff's default FL to 11/12.

And maybe also make its MINGW an alias of GW; as I noted in October,
with the above resources available (which the community didn't have in
1990 or 2000), I think we can argue that the MINGW groffism arose from
incomplete documentary record.

commit ece515ea1679b29dfbfcd24728aa1b81b94e55b4
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 28 20:24:12 2020 +1100

    doc/groff.texi: Checkpoint ms updates.
[...]
    * Clarify the GW/MINGW situation.  Also eliminate an uncharitable
      observation about the AT&T ms feature being documented but
      unimplemented.  What probably happened is, the writer access had to V6
      ms but was reading the V7 ms manual.  The GW register did in fact show
      up between 1975 and 1979.  TUHS makes research easier nowadays.

      We can probably just switch to using GW, and I think we should.  MINGW
      is too easy to read incorrectly (as "Ming W"), and to confuse with
      "Minimalist GNU for Windows".  (I'll be annoyed if the semantics
      of GW and MINGW differ, but I suspect it'll still be worth it.)

Maybe I should start a different thread for that, though.

Regards,
Branden

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