Re: [Groff] Sun's troff now available

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The sort of thing I have in mind is targeted right at the line which
> is about to be output, as follows lines. Suppose you have formatted
> output lines (say, as you mentioned, in a narrow-column context)
> like:
> 
>    This   formatted   line   needs
>    smaller spaces.  So track kern-
>    ing can be used to reduce them.

You are aware how the corresponding node list(s) looks like?

> If you had a "pre-output" macro (just as you can have macros which
> are sprung by bottom-of-page, so you could have macros sprung by
> "about to output line"), then this could look at [...]

Similar to TeX I think it is next to impossible to find a suitable
macro interface for the things you want to do.

> a) Inter-word spaces: if larger than a threshold, expand the
>    inter-character space until these are reduced below it.

Instead of handling this with a macro I could imagine to set and unset
a flag which makes troff do that.

> b) Is there an end-of-line character (like the soft hyphen above,
>    which might not have been explicit in the source) which we would
>    like to hang over the end of the line?  Then slightly increase
>    the linelength of this line (or redefine "-" to have smaller
>    width, or whatever) so that it sticks out by the right amount.

Ditto.


    Werner