Re: [groff] Skip the stripper?

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> I'm going bug-eyed trying to spot where the problem occurs.

On line number 9956 you have a conditional with a multiline
block.  The often-seen formatting style for this is

[1]
  .if condition \{\
  .stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

where the last backslash on the first line serves to hide
the newline, so that the actual formatting is

[1a]
  .if condition \{.stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

However, if you add a comment to the first line, like this:

[2]
  .if condition \{\ \" comment
  .stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

then instead of hiding the newline, you explicitly output a
line containing a single space, similar to

[2a]
  .if condition \{\
  \<space>
  .stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

This is normally not what you want, but in this particular
case your macros appear to rely on it, because the stripping
converts [2] back to [1] or [1a], which behaves differently.

My suggestion: don't use a pattern like [2], because it
doesn't make clear what your intent is.  If you want a
comment there, use

[3]
  .if condition \{.\" comment
  .stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

and if you explicitly need the line containing a space, use

[3a]
  .if condition \{.\" comment
  \<space>
  .stuff
  .more stuff
  .\}

I suspect that you didn't actually want that line, but since
the macros did what you wanted, you didn't pursue the matter
further.