Follow-up Comment #6, bug #63777 (project groff): Thanks for the expanded break explanation!
It's a little hard for me to judge--now that I know how it works--how well it explains the situation to someone who doesn't know how it works. But I wonder if there could still be some improvement here. For those savannah lurkers who want to follow the discussion but are also too lazy to look at commit ac4e28bd <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=ac4e28bd>, the new wording is: "A break updates the drawing position per the page offset, indentation, vertical spacing, and page length, interrupting filling." (As before, from here it talks only about how to cause breaks.) First, the current wording could be construed to mean a break _always_ updates the drawing position, but in fact it _conditionally_ updates it, only if the drawing position is somewhere other than where the next left margin would be. (That is, multiple breaks in a row have the same effect as a single break; only one of them updates the drawing position.) Then, once you start saying something like "updates the drawing position if necessary," the crux of comment #2 again arises: is a position update "necessary" when no output is pending and we're in the no-man's land (no-person's land?) before the first page? CSTR #54 treated this thing we're not calling a "pseudo-page transition" as a special case whose breaking behavior needed to be explicitly mentioned. I sympathize with the desire to keep wording general whenever possible--and maybe that _is_ possible here with some wording I haven't conceived of. But the novice roff user who grasps the basics--including that a break is a thing that normally has an effect only when it needs to--might well be tempted to think that the situation of being "above" the first page and having nothing queued is a case where a break need cause no movement. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63777> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/