Follow-up Comment #12, bug #62814 (group groff): I replied (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2024-09/msg00082.html) to Branden's email; the pertinent-to-this-bug portion of the reply (slightly recast to utilize savannah's markup) is pasted below. ---- > A person who has composed a table entry or any portion of a document > where filling has off, and employed a special character like \(mo or > \(*e or \(ca, is likely working from an expectation that whatever gets > typeset at that place in the text is not going to be wider than, say, > one em.
A fair point. But the alternative, on a terminal where tty-char.tmac is _not_ used, is a "special character not defined" warning and these characters missing from the output altogether. (None of them are defined in tty.tmac.) But yes, omitting those characters from the output does keep them from being wider than 1 em... > 2. a user's preference of whether the "visual" vs. "semantic" fallback > character definitions are used. But that's not the choice the user is presented with. As comment #0 notes, "both files contain (disjoint) sets of tty fallback character definitions." So the choices are "semantic" fallbacks vs. missing characters. The sets being disjoint was true when I wrote that in 2022. It's not strictly true as of last month's [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c9b3c99a6 commit c9b3c99a6], which moved a number of alphabetic characters with diacritical marks from fallbacks.tmac to tty.tmac, giving tty.tmac and tty-char.tmac slightly different fallback definitions for these characters. But even this overlap has little bearing on the points above: both versions of each of these fallbacks is a net 1 en wide; both versions are defined with the \z escape to overstrike two characters, just with slightly different characters in each case. (If anything, these common elements between the two files should be removed, and one set of overstruck characters be considered the canonical terminal fallback. As bug #62983 points out, whatever terminal you're using is unlikely to support overstriking anyway.) _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62814> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
