[bug #53243] regression: .hy not working in latest groff build

[Dave]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?53243>

                 Summary: regression: .hy not working in latest groff build
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: barx
            Submitted on: Tue 27 Feb 2018 07:33:52 PM CST
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Incorrect behaviour
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

Bjarni Ingi Gislason pointed out this bug in a comment in bug #53196.  That
bug documents a different (but related) issue, so I'm opening up this new bug
report.  As this is a regression since the last release, this should be
addressed before the new version of groff is released.

The problem is that .hy values 4 and 8 seem not to be honored anymore.  I've
confirmed that ".hy 8" works in the official groff release, but not in the
latest code built from git.  I've not yet backtracked to see which commit
introduced the bug.

Three lines of groff input illustrate this:

groff -a << EOF
.hy 8
.ll 1i
He is a skilled acrobat.
EOF

Running this on a groff built from current git code produces:

<beginning of page>
He is a skilled ac<hy>
robat.

".hy 8" should prevent the word "acrobat" from being hyphenated after two
characters.  And indeed, when run on the latest released groff, it does so,
pushing the whole word onto the next line.

(Bjarni's proposed solution is to remove these two values from groff's .hy
documentation and emit a warning if the user uses them.  However, a change to
functionality that has been documented and working in groff for two decades
needs to be discussed on the groff email list before being implemented.  I
will leave it to Bjarni to initiate this discussion if he feels that is the
best way to proceed.)




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