Should temporary indentation be ignored when centering?

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi all,

For just over 23 years, since commit e9b0d52dec, our Texinfo manual has
claimed that temporary indentation is ignored when lines are being
centered with the `ce` request.

But that is not the case in groff 1.22.4 or Git HEAD, and it's not true
of DWB 3.3 troff or Heirloom Doctools troff, either.

It's not ignored by `rj` either.

I'll be pushing a commit to comment out this incorrect statement, rather
than deleting it, because I think perhaps we should change this
behavior.

Most of the time I don't think it is what a user would expect.

If you do use it, you have to double the amount of the temporary
indentation to get what you would expect.  (The temporary indentation
gets cut in half as part of the centering arithmetic, I think.)

Also, you can't use a negative temporary indentation (if doing so
completely eats up more than the the normal indentation).  groff warns;
the others don't, but all lay out the output identically.

$ cat ce2.roff
.ce 4
foo
.ti -3n
bar
.ti 6n
baz
qux

$ DWBHOME=. ./bin/nroff ce2.roff |cat -s # or...
$ ./bin/nroff ce2.roff |cat -s # Heirloom, or...
$ nroff ./EXPERIMENTS/ce2.roff | cat -s # groff 1.22.4
                               foo
                               bar
                                  baz
                               qux

groff's warning, seen with '-wrange':
troff: ./EXPERIMENTS/ce2.roff:3: warning: total indent cannot be negative

What should be done?

Regards,
Branden

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