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.


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