[bug #64285] [troff] \D't' (set line thickness) drawing command alters drawing position

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #15, bug#64285 (group groff):

[comment #14 comment #14:]
> we now know that in the six months that 1.23 has been out, people have
complained about various changes debuting in it, but not this one (at least
not where I've seen it, though of course I don't follow every forum where such
complaints might be voiced).

I've been keeping an eye out as well, in many places (doing Web searches,
checking out distributors' change logs and bug trackers, monitoring techie Q&A
forums, and so forth).

Not a peep about \s.  This isn't a surprise to me, because most usage of the
escape sequence that I have seen isn't ambiguous.  Mostly what I see is man
pages (likely because they constitute a majority of *roff documents in the
world), doing stuff like:


foo\s-2bar\s0baz


...that.  These aren't ambiguous and we didn't change them.

We can revisit the matter in another six months, maybe, to see if we need to
update our observations, but assuming the level of consternation remains low
to zero, then I'd say the \s change was a good example of the sort of
regularizing, simplifying reform we _should_ be undertaking.

Just like \D't' not altering the drawing position!  ;-)

I trust I will not draw contradiction when I venture that explicit/manual use
of that escape sequence in documents is unlikely to be more prevalent than
\s.

If we want to start up another argument along these...lines, we can debate
whether the \D'p' request should automatically close the specified polygon, or
whether that drawing command is better thought of as a "polyline" operator. 
[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-08/msg00041.html This thread is
probably the place to resurrect the discussion initially.]


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