Re: How to print a literal '.' as the first character in a line?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Branden,

> At any rate, groff_man(7) in groff 1.22.4 does in fact cover this.
...
>        \&     Zero-width space.  Append to an input line to prevent an
>               end-of-sentence punctuation sequence from being
>               recognized as such, or insert at the beginning of an
>               input line to prevent a dot or apostrophe from being
>               interpreted as the beginning of a roff request.

This is from the notes on portability.  It seems odd have yet more
definitions of the escape sequences here rather than just listing the
sequences and leaving them to be explained elsewhere.

> In groff 1.23.0, this material will move to groff_man_style(7), since
> groff_man(7) is meant to slim itself down to a reference for the macro
> package proper, and not cover *roff language fundamentals.

groff_man_style doesn't sound like it should be covering ‘language
fundamentals’ either.

> Our Texinfo manual is similarly expanded.

Expansion is not necessarily good as it can easily worsen the noise-to-
signal ratio.

> We have now encountered almost all of the syntax there is in the 'roff'
> language, with an exception already noted in passing.  A "request" is an
> instruction to the formatter that occurs after a control character.  A
> "control character" must occur at the beginning of an input line to be
> recognized.(1)  (*note Requests and Macros-Footnote-1::) The regular
> control character has a counterpart, the "no-break control character",
> which suppresses the break that is implied by some requests.  The
> default control characters are the dot ('.') and the neutral apostrophe
> ('''), the latter being the no-break control character.  These
> characters were chosen because it is uncommon for lines of text in
> natural languages to begin them.  If you require a formatted period or
> apostrophe (closing single quotation mark) where GNU 'troff' is
> expecting a control character, prefix the dot or neutral apostrophe with
> the non-printing input break escape sequence, '\&'.

Over the years, repeated advice from Bell Labs on good technical writing
has been to first absorb Strunk and White.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.