Hi Christof, At 2023-04-08T20:56:57+0200, Christof Meerwald wrote: > just gave 1.23.0.rc3 a quick try
Thank you for evaluating this RC. Our maintainer might be able to tag an RC4 this weekend and 1..n weeks after that, I hope, we'll go final. > and noticed a difference for the following input with -ms (-Tascii and > -Tpdf show the same difference): > > .nr PD 1v > .LP > X1 > .LD > X2 > .DE > .LP > X3 > .LD > X4 > .DE > X5 > .LP > .LP > X6 > > with 1.23.0.rc3 I now only get a single blank line between X2 and X3, > but with earlier versions (1.22.4 and also 1.19.2) I got 2 blank lines > there. > > Is this change expected? Yes. Technically, this changed behavior is the result of a bug fix to bring our rendering of ms documents more in line with AT&T troff ms, and we don't ordinarily document bug fixes in the NEWS file. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62688 But since you're the second person to have raised this issue to the mailing list, it seems it might be worth adding a NEWS item about it. So I'll see about that. Other changes were also prompted by efforts to faithfully reproduce AT&T troff ms output for vintage ms documents. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62687 [1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62686 If you have some inter-display or inter-paragraph spacing you need to exactly preserve, I suggest manipulating the `DD` and `PD` registers prior to the `DS`, `DE`, or paragraphing macro calls to which you want them to apply. Here is how the groff_ms(7) man page documents these registers in the forthcoming 1.23.0. Paragraph settings Parameter Definition Effective Default ------------------------------------------------------------------------ \n[PI] Indentation next paragraph 5n \n[PD] Paragraph distance (spacing) next paragraph 0.3v (1v) \n[QI] Quotation indentation next paragraph 5n \n[PORPHANS] # of initial lines kept next paragraph 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Display settings Parameter Definition Effective Default --------------------------------------------------------------------- \n[DD] Display distance (spacing) special 0.5v (1v) \n[DI] Display indentation special 0.5i --------------------------------------------------------------------- ... For entries marked "special" in the "Effective" column, see the discussion in the applicable section below. ... The PD and DD registers use the larger value if the vertical motion quantum of the output device is too coarse for the smaller one; usually, this is the case only for output to terminals and emulators thereof. ... The distance stored in \n[DD] is inserted before and after each pair of display macros, replacing any adjacent inter-paragraph distance; this is a Berkeley extension. The DI register is a GNU extension; ... Changes to either register take effect at the next display boundary. In groff 1.23 we also have a new document, ms.ms (available in source and PostScript forms), which serves as a guide to the macro package. I'm attaching an alteration of your reproducer that formats the same in nroff mode with groff 1.22.4 and groff 1.23.0. It also formats the same with Heirloom Doctools ms except for the inclusion of the date in the page footer (a documented difference between AT&T-descended ms and GNU ms). (If you add an `ND` call to the top of the document, the two formatters produce identical output.) DWB 3.3 ms is the same as Heirloom ms except that DWB does not honor the new display distance (DD) before the `DE` call on line 7. This appears to me to be a bug in DWB ms that Heirloom corrected. Many aspects of ms were not rigidly specified by AT&T and consequently there is some wiggle room among implementations. A more notorious one is that there is no official list of which *roff requests constitute valid input in ms documents. Lesk 1978 explicitly names only `br`, `bp`, `sp`, and `na`, but elsewhere implies by discussion or example that `nr`, `ds`, and `de` are supported (as indeed they must be to exercise the documented features of the package). Thank you for your patience. Further feedback is welcome! Regards, Branden [1] AT&T ms of course did not support a `MINGW` register--its name was too long--but the point here was the handling of the gutter width.
christof-gbr.ms
Description: Troff MS-macros document
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
