Re: [Groff] pic: No white space allowed between . and PS?

[Werner LEMBERG]

>  |Yes.  But generally it can be expected that spaces between \
>  |. and a macro name doesn't matter.
> 
> I agree with you here.

Just in case it hasn't been mentioned before: At least for the `.so'
request, there is a big difference between

  .so

and

  .    so

The former gets preprocessed with `soelim', while the latter is only
recognized by `troff'.  In other words, this difference provides a
means to suppress file inclusion even if `soelim' is used.

Admittedly, this mechanism doesn't make much sense with other
preprocessors in general, but I think it's not a bad idea to stay with
this scheme for orthogonality:

  .XXX

can be handled by a preprocessor, while

 .<whitespace>XXX

is something only `troff' should process.


    Werner