Re: [Groff] "Cosmetic" filling

[Ted Harding]

On 30-Aug-06 Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
>> [1] I have just written a 1-page document in which I noticed that
>> two standalone lines, as output, and one final line of a paragraph,
>> all seemed to exactly fill the line-length.  I verified this using a
>> duplicate of the lines terminated with "\p": at high magnification
>> in ghostview the two ends are at exactly the same vertical position,
>> to within ocular resolution!
> 
> Your observation is correct, I think: I noted the same with grotty
> output, and I dislike it very much to see the last line of a paragraph
> flushed to the whole length, introducing, say, a single two-letter
> space where all other spaces consists of a single-space character.
> 
> I haven't found out yet the cause of this behaviour; I invite you to
> use a debugger so that you can find the relevant spot. :-)

I'm not sure about the 'grotty' phenomenon which Werner reports.
I tried a simple case as follows. First, the input file "grtest.tr":

.LP
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P

(last line truncated to the max that will not overflow to the next
line on my machine; your mileage may be different).

Next, the command line:

  cat grtest.tr | troff -Tascii -ms | grotty

(just to make sure it's all spelt out).


Finally, the output (view in fixed-width font):

A  B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G  H
I  J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L
M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P


So the last line did not get expanded to fill the line-length.

On the other hand, if I terminate the input with "\p" then of
course I get

A  B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G  H
I  J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L
M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O  P

as expected.

Maybe there's some extra feature in the input where Werner
sees that effect which is not present in a simplistic input
such as my test.

Using, for this, groff version 1.18.1

Best wishes to all,
Ted.

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Date: 30-Aug-06                                       Time: 11:57:23
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