Re: [Groff] nroff vs. troff conditional using escapes?

[Clarke Echols]

Michael(tm) Smith wrote:

> The particular problem I run into with using a request for this is
> that when the term I wanted to have alternative strings for is
> immediately preceded and/or followed by a punctuation mark. For
> example, a user might have DocBook source (which my app needs to
> convert to groff source) like this:
>
>   <para>For more information, see the preceding section (<xref
>   linkend="desc"/>) or the <xref linkend="intro"/> section for
>   this document.</para>
>
> So when I generate groff source from that -- which includes
> dereferencing the <xref> instances to get the title of the
> sections they points to (e.g. "Description") -- I get:
>
>   .PP
>   For more information, see the preceding section (
>   .t-or-n "Description" "DESCRIPTION"
>   ) or the
>   .t-or-n "Introduction" "INTRODUCTION"
>   section for this document.
>
> And if I then view the rendered output of that, I get:
>
>   For more information, see the preceding section ( Description )
>   or the Introduction section for this document.
>
> That is, an undesirable wordspace gets inserted after the between
> the parens before and after the word "Description".
>
> Hence my question about whether there really is no way I could use
> a set of escapes instead of a request...
>
>   --Mike

Add the line-continuation escape inside the argument:

   .PP
   For more information, see the preceding section (
   .t-or-n "Description\c" "DESCRIPTION\c"
   ) or the
   .t-or-n "Introduction\c" "INTRODUCTION\c"
   section for this document.

That will prevent insertion of whitespace where end-of-line occurs
in the source file.

Clarke