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[bug #62593] clarify description of end-of-sentence detection


From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: [bug #62593] clarify description of end-of-sentence detection
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 01:35:31 -0400 (EDT)

Update of bug #62593 (project groff):

                  Status:               Postponed => In Progress            

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Follow-up Comment #7:


[comment #3 comment #3:]
> [comment #1 comment #1:]
> > I've been chewing over the idea of discarding as many "space"
> > terms as possible in favor of "motions".
> 
> Hmm, I wonder if that's another case of veering into being technically
correct at the expense of some clarity to the average reader (a la replacing
"single quote" with "neutral apostrophe" in a coding context*).  Sure,
theoretically all spaces (horizontal or vertical) are motions, but especially
for horizontal spacing, it seems like users will more naturally think of
something like \0 as a space the width of a digit, rather than a horizontal
cursor motion of that magnitude.

After doing some experimenting I'm more confident that my musing in comment
#1, quoted above, is a step in the right direction.

A "space" as I'm proposing to use it can always be discarded at a break and a
horizontal motion cannot be.  This is leading me to introduce the \~ escape
sequence much earlier, in section "Manipulating Filling and Adjustment" rather
than in "Page Motions".  And that's good because *roff writers _should_ learn
\~ fairly early.  TeX's ~, to similarly suppress breaks as in "G.~W.~Pabst",
is introduced fairly early in the tutorial material I recall.

The following exercise helped push me in this direction.


$ cat EXPERIMENTS/spaces-and-motions.groff 
.na
.nm 1
.if n .ll 23n
.if t .ll 1.25i
This is my rifle.
This is my rifle.
.br
This is my rifle.\ \ 
This is my rifle.
.br
This is my rifle.\~\~
This is my rifle.
.br
This is my rifle.\0\0
This is my rifle.
.br
This is my rifle.\h'1i'
This is my rifle.
.if t \{\
.br
This is my rifle.\|\|\|\|\|\|
This is my rifle.
.br
This is my rifle.\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^
This is my rifle.
.\}
.pl \n[nl]u



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