Indeed, you can tweak things pretty closely (but not exactly) with ~~~~~~~~, but it fails to express logical intent. Thus it is brittle. If you want to change anything left of the = sign, you have to do more twiddling (pun intended) to restore the alignnment. Ditto if you change the document font.
Doug Damian wrote: .EQ ~~~~~~~~~~~ doug ~ mark = ~ expression1 .EN .br .EQ malcolmdouglasmcilroy ~ lineup = ~ expression2 .EN