RE: [Groff] Re: Readability of troff documents

[Ted Harding]

On 23-May-03 Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>> Is there a way (other than preprocessing through some sed
>> filter) of inserting these the way they're inserted in
>> LaTeX? Ie:
>> 
>> em dash is ---
>> en dash is --
> 
> Unfortunately no.  The ligatures possible are fi, fl, ff, ffi, and
> ffl.  It needs a non-trivial extension to handle more.  Sigh.  Time,
> time, time.

Agreed!! This was a question I remember discussing with Werner a long time
ago! There are several useful candidates for an extended "ligature" set,
such as

  ``  ''   for opening and closing quotes
  --  ---  for en and em dashes (as in the current thread)

and different users can think of ones they would specially like. So
ideally "ligatures" should not be hard-wired as they are now, but
user-definable/selectable; and this is definitely not trivial!

(Of course, this sort of usage is strictly speaking not a "ligature"
in the printer's sense but concerns recognition of two or more successive
input characters as representing a single glyph -- French writers, for
instance, might find it useful to type "te^te" instead of "t\(e^te",
and e-circumflex is not a ligature).

A compromise, which does somewhat improve readibility, is to use the
\[..] syntax instead of \(.. -- to my eyes at least it is much easier
to see what is happening (see below). As so often, the ".char" command is
most useful here, as in

.char \[--] \(em

And, as suggested, there is always the possibility of preprocessing
with 'sed' or 'awk'\[--]I do this when using troff to print emails,
for instance.[*]

Ted.

[*] As compared with

And, as suggested, there is always the possibility of preprocessing
with 'sed' or 'awk'\(--I do this when using troff to print emails,
for instance.

which I think is less readable, though still much more readable than

And, as suggested, there is always the possibility of preprocessing
with 'sed' or 'awk'\(emI do this when using troff to print emails,
for instance.

Even in this last case, the use of "\[...]" still helps readability:

And, as suggested, there is always the possibility of preprocessing
with 'sed' or 'awk'\[em]I do this when using troff to print emails,
for instance.



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Date: 23-May-03                                       Time: 10:33:54
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