URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67065>
Summary: want a beginning-of-output-line macro
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: None
Submitted: Thu 01 May 2025 07:49:29 PM UTC
Category: Core
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: Feature change
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Thu 01 May 2025 07:49:29 PM UTC By: Anonymous
Quoting Ted Harding: "for a variety of reasons (the email-prefix, Werner's
French-quotation issue, continuous _true_ underlining/strikeout, etc.) what
groff really needs is a 'beginning-of-line' macro (default null) which will be
[in]voked at the moment troff starts to collect the material to be formatted
into the next output line (but it would have to 'push back' any left-over
which didn't fit onto the previous line)." See
http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2002-11/msg00056.html for a fuller rationale.
Werner later presents another use case for such a macro:
http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2003-01/msg00032.html
Although some macro packages specify names of macro "hooks" which are by
default undefined but which the user can define to take actions in specific
circumstances (e.g., -me's .$H), I don't recall the basic language using this
technique anywhere else, so this new macro would have to be carefully named to
be unlikely to collide with any existing user macros.
Alternatively, and more in line with how roffs have historically tended to
handle such situations, this could be a new type of trap, allowing the user to
specify any macro name they desire, but not reserving any macro name in
particular for this purpose.
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