Re: collected groff man pages and performance (was: Syntax errors in makeindex.1)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Tue, 5 May 2026 20:45:40 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260506014540.5qznpe4fw2ao3p6k@illithid>

At 2026-05-05T11:09:41-0300, sebastien peterson-boudreau wrote:
[rearranging]
> Afaik, the language makes no identification of margins ; that is done
> on the level of a macro package.

Right.  More precisely, the *roff language knows only about "page
offset", "indentation", and "line length".

> I‘m interested in this hangpunc program -- would it be possible to do
> this with the ditroff output, though ?

I think it's likely, if the program scanned ahead in its input--or
equivalently, kept a memory of trout commands already seen--to detect
line breaks advertised by the `n` command.

groff_out(5):
     n b a  Indicate a break.  No action is performed; the command is
            present to make the output more easily parsed.  The integers
            b and a describe the vertical space amounts before and after
            the break, respectively.  GNU troff issues this command but
            groff’s output driver library ignores it.  See v and V.

Regards,
Branden

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