Re: [groff] 05/16: doc/meref.me.in: Update and revise.

[Dave Kemper]

Hi Branden,

I have comments on two of the numerous changes of this commit.

>  this material can then be resequenced
> +by the
> +.b pdfswitchtopage
> +macro (for PDF output),
>  by a tool that processes the output format,
>  or physically moved
>  to the beginning of the printed document.

Before this insertion, this was two verb phrases joined by an "and";
now it's written as a series of three items, but two are prepositional
phrases and one is a verb phrase, which is not a grammatical series.

> -Useful for forcing out footnotes,
> -but other than
> -that hardly ever used.
> -Must be followed by a
> +.\" Useful for forcing out footnotes,
> +.\" but other than
> +.\" that hardly ever used.

I sympathize with wanting to save "page" space (and, more generally,
striving for concision), but completeness and clarity ought to take
priority, and I feel this deletion reduces those.

A .bp or end of input are typically satisfactory ways to end a page or
a document, so a macro that ends a page but can only precede one of
those two things sounds nigh useless; the removed sentence was the
only thing that motivated the macro's use.  Conversely, users who find
a footnote missing in their document will no longer be able to
discover the macro that will restore it by searching the -me manual
for the word "footnote."  And even if they happen across .ep in the
manual, without that sentence there's still little clue this is the
solution they were looking for.