Re: [Groff] developers only?

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Wed Mar 30 13:09:40 2005, address@hidden wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:47:43PM +0200, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
...
> > Well, if one interprets what Otavio says as "requests and macro
> > calls must be at the start of lines", it makes sense to me. It
> > .I is
> > a bit hard to swallow, if you come from e.g. a TeX background where
> > the markup doesn't disturb the flow of the text as much. People who have
> > complained about this include my hacker colleague, the UTP authors (IIRC)
> > and my kid brother
> > .ft CW
> > ;-)
> 
> Coming from a version control background I happen to love the roff requests
> because they have a natural tendency to break things up.  When people 
> create really long lines and version control them then small changes tend
> to conflict more.

True; if you write in plain text without markup and use e.g. Emacs'
fill-paragraph to make it look nice, then the smallest unit of change will
be the paragraph, more or less.

IMHO, that's a good reason to use troff, being able to create simple plain
text document (like READMEs) without messing up diffing and version control.

The problem with the requests is that they don't break the lines where a
person wants them broken -- at end-of-sentence, comma and so on.

BR,
/Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <address@hidden>                                   -- Jonas