Re: *roff hyphenation trivia challenge

[Steve Izma]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 06:51:51PM +0200, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> Subject: Re: *roff hyphenation trivia challenge

> For "antidisestablishmen\%tarianism", groff prints
> 
>   antidisestablishmen-
>   tar-
>   i-
>   an-
>   ism
> 
> (which I think is strange), while TeX and Heirloom troff print
> 
>   antidisestablishmen-
>   tarianism
> 
> which I think is the only reasonable way of handling this case.

I disagree. I prefer groff's behaviour because I don't ever want
correct hyphenation points to be ignored. Using \% is almost
always a correction to the hyphenation logic. If I'm typesetting
a book, corrections to a paragraph can happen at any time up to
the final delivery of the files for printing. Even a
single-letter correction in a paragraph can change the line
breaks and make the corrected hyphenation unnecessary and
inappropriate. In that case I don't want to have to go around
searching for hyphenation corrections in order to revert to a
greater choice of hyphenation points.

However, that means that the above example removes correct
hyphenation points before the added correction. If a bug is going
to be fixed, I suggest that the correct points on both sides of
the \% should be retained.

Also for \% at the beginning of a word, I rarely use this. If I
don't want a word hyphenated at all, then it's likely that I
don't want it hyphenated anywhere in the document. And in such
cases I would add

.hw antidisestablishmentarianism

to the document once (or, preferably, to a local tmac file used
for the project).

This may not be important for man page authors, but it's very
important in a production environment.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma@golden.net  cellphone: 519-998-2684

==
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       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996