[bug #58450] additional inter-sentence spaces should be stretched in fully justified text

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #58450 (project groff):

It turns out the behavior isn't limited to additional inter-sentence space. 
Consider: what would you expect the following to produce?


echo 'x x    x\p' | groff


The quoted string contains 5 spaces: 1 between the first two x's, and 4
between the last two.

When the \p forces the line to be adjusted with this minimal input, a
reasonable expectation would be that all five spaces would be stretched
equally, producing four times the distance between the last two x's as between
the first two.  Reasonable, and wrong.  As before, the difference in spacing
is not visually detectable; only measuring reveals that the distance between
the second and third x is a tiny bit wider than that between the first and
second.

This is kind of interesting and kind of irrelevant.  Kind of interesting,
because it suggests that the root cause of the behavior reported by this bug
may not be related to the additional inter-sentence space (.ss's second
parameter), but to any case of adjacent spaces.  Kind of irrelevant,
because--unlike in the case of additional inter-sentence space--it's not clear
what the behavior should be.  Typographically speaking, if a user wants
horizontal space of other than a conventional width (e.g., word space,
sentence space, thin space, digit space, etc.--all of which groff provides
documented mechanisms for), the proper way to achieve that would be through
the \h escape, not through trying to string together stretchable word spaces.


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