Re: [Groff] Werner's Margin Notes

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> My original post was more of a "how difficult would these be to
> implement as groff requests?" query than a request for assistance.
> I understand .sp, and have for some time included a "CR/no-LF" macro
> (kludge) in the mom macros.  So it was actually a wish-list thought.
> I gather the answer is "too difficult to warrant doing it."


On the contrary, I suspect it would be rather easy to implement
these features as formatter requests.  However, I think we
shouldn't be doing this for two simple reasons:

  * As long as they're easily implementable as macros, without
    a significant runtime penalty, there's no need to, and we
    should keep the formatter as simple and small as possible.

  * It's not clear how the carriage-return macro should behave
    in case the line parts before and after the call have
    different extra-line-space requirements[*].  With several
    macro implementations to choose from, at least we can pick
    the one that best serves a particular need.

[*] For example:
 (a) both parts are independently spaced vertically relative to
     the preceding output line
 (b) the second is spaced relative to the first (like ".sp -1")
 (c) both are forced to have the same baseline (this is what my
     implementation does), using the larger of the requested
     extra-line-spaces