On 5/5/23, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > We can assert that the position of the text baseline is one of those > properties of the output line that is not determined until the line has > been broken. And what the `sp` request really does is decide where your > next text baseline is going to be.
That explanation makes sense to me. Thank you! > [2] which we should be able to detect and warn about since we know where > all the glyph bounding boxes are on the page[3] > [3] On the gripping hand I've heard that collision detection is not > necessarily a trivial problem Detecting overlapping glyphs that require an italic correction would SEEM to be a simple subset of the problem, but groff doesn't do that automatically, and I dimly recall asking about that on the list years ago and being told it wasn't automatable. Hmm, now that I track down the thread (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2013-11/msg00019.html), no one's replies mentioned bounding boxes; the consensus was the the data needed for the job wasn't available, which seems less true in light of your footnote [2] above. But maybe no one mentioned them because that data is insufficient, which your footnote [3] supports.
