Wanted: your historical me(7) documents (was: [groff] 08/21: [me]: Integrate better with papersize.tmac.)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Dave,

At 2022-11-28T05:41:50-0600, Dave Kemper wrote:
> On 11/25/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I did think of this.  I rapidly ran into a problem.
> >
> > I can't _find_ any historical -me documents.
> 
> I see that less as a problem and more as an interesting bit of trivia.
> The lack of publicly available historical -me documents might hint at,
> but not prove, a corresponding dearth of private ones.  We may not
> currently be able to prove the existence of such documents, but we'll
> never be able to prove their nonexistence.

That's true.  Perhaps what I was badly getting across in the above was.

"Share your historical me(7) documents with the world: that way a
certain groff developer can undertake revisions to the macro package in
cognizance of their expectations!"

> In any case, we don't need specific documents in order to realize that
> the change in default behavior will affect any such documents that
> rely on that default.  ("Affect" here doesn't necessarily mean
> "degrade" and in some cases might mean "improve.")

Right.  I won't make any promises of slavish back-compatibility, but
retypesetting Kernighan & Cherry's eqn paper earlier this year enabled
me to find and fix, bugs in our ms(7) that improved its rendering, and
doubtless that over other documents composed for AT&T ms.

> Still, as long as the release notes mention the default line-length
> change, I think we're covered.  It looks like the relevant NEWS item
> mentions that the default has _not_ changed for terminal output, but
> doesn't say anything concrete about the typeset default.

No; I think I left that out because I wanted to leave myself some
freedom.  65cpl looks a little weird to me, especially if there is
no page offset.

But I also have my evil idea for an nroff(7) enhancement in groff 1.24
that I have mentioned before.

> > Yes; with it and the other defaults, you get a 1 inch left margin
> > and a 1½ inch right margin.  I remember when English instructors
> > would savage your paper and your grade with a fat-tipped red pen for
> > such things.
> 
> Luckily for all those high schoolers trying to pad the page count of
> their essays, groff offers much subtler ways of doing this than
> adjusting the margins.

😈

> > I think I'd prefer to assume that people want 1 inch margins all
> > around the page;
> 
> I agree.

Not sure if I have the time or drive to reform all of groff's macro
packages to this effect before 1.23, but we'll see.

I also note that this "uniform" one-inch margin does _not_ count page
headers and footers, which in groff macro packages tend to be set one
half-inch from the page top and bottom, respectively.

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature