Follow-up Comment #5, bug #64501 (project groff): [comment #4 comment #4:] > [comment #2 comment #2:] > > the user ought to be strongly encouraged to disable automatic > > hyphenation in documents targeting HTML. > > Self follow-up: it turns out the user needn't be encouraged or discouraged from any such thing, as tmac/html.tmac already disables hyphenation and disallows the user to turn it back on: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/html.tmac?id=a246806d81351996ac2fa4a8f0826915e576bc0f#n25
Yeah, I'm uneasy about that. > [comment #3 comment #3:] > > grohtml _does_ try to set the line length really long. > > In light of the above, this seems unnecessary, and potentially even counterproductive: the user might want lines in the HTML source broken in reasonable places for easier handling in a text editor. But that's not the source form of the document, so why would they bother? If someone needs to finagle _grohtml_(1) output, _sed_(1) is available, as are text editors that are old hands at managing insanely long lines of text. > To an HTML renderer, a space and a newline are equivalent, so where line breaks occur in the HTML that groff outputs won't affect the rendered page at all. Except when <pre> is used. But that's a crude tool that I want to get us away from. We should change the font family with CSS style attributes or an equivalent. > ...with one exception, and that is if groff breaks a word at a hard hyphen, which it is usually free to do regardless of the hyphenation setting. It strikes me now that this may be what the incomprehensible(-to-me) sentence that launched this bug was trying to get at. > On the third hand, even _that_ ought to be disabled by the .cflags line in html.tmac (see the link above). Right. Why doesn't that work? > So I'm no more enlightened than when I started this reply. We'll get you (along with the rest of us) there eventually. > > We could define a new papersize that is effectively infinite > > in both dimensions... > > I see no downside to this for the vertical dimension. I see none for the horizontal dimension either, but perhaps I have about as callous an attitude toward the readability of _grohtml_(1) output as the authors of _docbook-to-man_ had toward my beloved _man_(7) format. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64501> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/