Re: [bug #60233] [PATCH] doc/groff.texi: ambiguity in .tkf documentation

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Mon, 4 May 2026 15:05:54 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260504200554.7qcyyncp2syhlylb@illithid>

At 2026-04-29T14:58:01-0400, Dave wrote:
> Update of bug #60233 (group groff):
[...]
> In addition to the content changes, this patch rebreaks lines
> following current convention.[1]  Recent commits seem to refer to this
> as breaking lines "in a roff-friendly way," but it's really for the
> benefit of diff, not roff.  (It is following the convention used in
> man pages, so "in a man-page-conventional way" would also be accurate.
> But a major reason for the man page convention is how it clarifies
> content changes in diffs by omitting consequent reflowing, so I feel
> diff is at the root of the rationale for it.)

I concur.  Future commits of mine adopt new phraseology.

> Accordingly, I first rebroke the existing lines, then edited the
> wording, then ran a diff between those two steps to show the content
> changes my patch makes:

"git diff --word-diff" is also helpful for this.

> [1] My idea of "current convention" is merely to break lines between
> sentences and at logical places within them.  If a more specific
> convention has been followed thus far (e.g. always break before a
> conjunction), this patch should be reflowed again to reflect that.

I have nothing more rigid than Kernighan's rule, plus my own habit of
breaking "before and after multi-word parentheticals".

Texinfo's lack of line continuation (\newline in *roff) makes the rule
impossible to follow in some cases, as when using footnotes.

(It does technically have that feature, sort of, but you can't use it
everywhere--for instance in `@cindex` calls, it doesn't work.  Since it
doesn't work everywhere I need it to, I haven't arsed myself to learn
the rules.)

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)