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

[T . Kurt Bond]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Kurt!
> 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

Thanks for pointing these resources out; they'll be very useful.

> 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 would a groff user notice *that* change?  I'm conflicted.

It does seem that history is on the side of 11/12.  I'd guess that
this is something else that wasn't documented, and may have been
guessed at when it came time to the groff -ms reimplementation.

> 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.

I thinking making MINGW an alias of GW is a very good idea.

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io/