Hi Dave, At 2022-11-28T05:41:50-0600, Dave Kemper wrote: > On 11/25/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I did think of this. I rapidly ran into a problem. > > > > I can't _find_ any historical -me documents. > > I see that less as a problem and more as an interesting bit of trivia. > The lack of publicly available historical -me documents might hint at, > but not prove, a corresponding dearth of private ones. We may not > currently be able to prove the existence of such documents, but we'll > never be able to prove their nonexistence.
That's true. Perhaps what I was badly getting across in the above was.
"Share your historical me(7) documents with the world: that way a
certain groff developer can undertake revisions to the macro package in
cognizance of their expectations!"
> In any case, we don't need specific documents in order to realize that
> the change in default behavior will affect any such documents that
> rely on that default. ("Affect" here doesn't necessarily mean
> "degrade" and in some cases might mean "improve.")
Right. I won't make any promises of slavish back-compatibility, but
retypesetting Kernighan & Cherry's eqn paper earlier this year enabled
me to find and fix, bugs in our ms(7) that improved its rendering, and
doubtless that over other documents composed for AT&T ms.
> Still, as long as the release notes mention the default line-length
> change, I think we're covered. It looks like the relevant NEWS item
> mentions that the default has _not_ changed for terminal output, but
> doesn't say anything concrete about the typeset default.
No; I think I left that out because I wanted to leave myself some
freedom. 65cpl looks a little weird to me, especially if there is
no page offset.
But I also have my evil idea for an nroff(7) enhancement in groff 1.24
that I have mentioned before.
> > Yes; with it and the other defaults, you get a 1 inch left margin
> > and a 1½ inch right margin. I remember when English instructors
> > would savage your paper and your grade with a fat-tipped red pen for
> > such things.
>
> Luckily for all those high schoolers trying to pad the page count of
> their essays, groff offers much subtler ways of doing this than
> adjusting the margins.
😈
> > I think I'd prefer to assume that people want 1 inch margins all
> > around the page;
>
> I agree.
Not sure if I have the time or drive to reform all of groff's macro
packages to this effect before 1.23, but we'll see.
I also note that this "uniform" one-inch margin does _not_ count page
headers and footers, which in groff macro packages tend to be set one
half-inch from the page top and bottom, respectively.
Regards,
Branden
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