Re: [groff] How can you prevent \| from sabotaging end-of-sentence detection?

[Dave Kemper]

On 2/5/18, Boss Hog <address@hidden> wrote:
> The \| isn't truly a character, it simply instructs groff to pick up its
> pen and move a few steps to the right. By using the .char request we may
> create a virtual character to operate on.

Thank you, that was exactly what I needed.

In fact, once you gave me the idea to wrap the horizontal movement in
a .char request, I discovered I could assign even the \| escape in
this manner, not needing to resort to the lower-level \h.

This method seems like a little unnecessary overhead, but one
advantage is that you can make different uses of the thin space
context-dependent; that is, you can tell groff that \[Q_S] should be
ignored in end-of-sentence detection, but other thin spaces (using \|
directly, or a different .char definition) should not be.  Not a
practical consideration for me, since separating quotation marks is
the only place I use it, but my inner programmer appreciates the
semantic distinction.