Re: [Groff] RE: Small bug in groff 1.19.2 footnote number contro

[Larry Jones]

Werner LEMBERG writes:
> 
> I assume there wasn't any other, `official' possibility to
> reset the footnote counter, right?

Well, there's specifying a second argument to the FD macro which causes
the footnote counter to get reset at each first-level heading, but that
appears to be just as undocumented.

Since mm was primarily used inside AT&T where everyone had access to the
source code (with comments!), that was the primary documentation --
everything else was just supplemental and not kept up to date.  If I get
an old mm document from someone, I don't want to have to go on a long
search to figure out what the mysterious number register and string
references mean and what the groff mm equivalents are before I can
format the document with groff, I want it to just work!  The existing
macros already have a bunch of backward compatibility aliases for the
most common internals, but I think it behooves us to add more when
references to them turn up in existing documents.  However, adding new
aliases is as far as I think we should go -- I wouldn't want to revise
the groff mm implementation just to support backward compatibility if
there isn't already an existing equivalent to alias.

-Larry Jones

He's just jealous because I accomplish so much more than he does. -- Calvin