The discussion about `so` request usage got me to thinking, so I decided to flag another consequence of the newly consistent system for handling file name arguments to *roff requests.
The short version is that if you've been doing stuff like this: .so "5150".lrc to read a file named "5150".lrc--yes, with the quotation marks truly as part of the file name--then you will need to migrate to the new `ds`/`as`-style syntax or you will probably be unhappy. .so ""5150".lrc Handling of a neutral double quote in any non-initial position has not changed. For example, .so Planet_"X".lrc ...worked before and will continue to work without change. How many groff users are in the habit of naming files with a leading neutral double quote? Few, I suspect--perhaps fewer than name with embedded spaces any files the formatter needs to handle. On the other hand, neutral double quotes in file names _did_ actually work. Unless you got adventurous and combined them with embedded spaces, in which case things fell apart. So in groff Git HEAD (actually, in Git for the past few months), you've been able to do this: .so Planet "X".lrc ...whereas you could not in groff 1.23 and earlier, or Heirloom Doctools troff, DWB 3.3 troff, or Solaris 10 troff. I had thought this was too much of a corner case to flag in NEWS, let alone at the top of the 1.24 entry as an "incompatible change", but I got my fingers burnt with the hyphenation-language-as-global-versus- environmental discussion, so better safe than sorry, I reckon. Again, for background on this, see comments #2-#6 (or so) of <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65108>. (Most of the discussion in that ticket is between me and Dave Kemper on with whether and how to get GNU troff to accept, encode for the C standard library, and report non-printable byte values in file names. I think we have a strategy sorted out, but time ran out to implement it for groff 1.24.) Here's the NEWS item that should appear in my next push to Git: * If your roff(7) documents specify a file name that starts with a neutral double quote (") to any of the requests `cf`, `hpf`, `hpfa`, `mso`, `msoquiet`, `nx`, `open`, `opena`, `so`, `soquiet`, or `trf`, you are likely to get a diagnostic message, or the formatter will open a file of the same name except for the leading neutral double quote. That is because these requests are now able to process file names containing leading space characters. (This change also makes the request syntax consistent with that of `ds`, `as`, and others.) The solution is to add an additional neutral double quote to the start of the file name argument. For example, we would change: .so "5150".lrc to: .so ""5150".lrc to tell the formatter to read a file named '"5150".lrc', where the neutral single quotes are used to bracket the file name. Regards, Branden
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