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

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Dave,

At 2023-09-11T19:43:48-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> 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.

Fair point.  Wil fix.

> > -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.

You're a more seasoned me(7) user than I am; the only application of
`ep` that I _can_ think of is to flush pending footnotes without causing
a new page to start (which would be blank if the footnote area doesn't
overflow).

Does that match your understanding?  Is there another use case?

Regards,
Branden

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