[bug #58500] default value for second parameter to .ss should follow modern typographic convention

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #58500 (project groff):

Comment #4 covers an awful lot of ground and I don't have the brain space to
tackle it all at once, so I'm breaking it down based on the ideas it
introduces.  Today's installment: community.

If we want to be data-driven, what is the data surrounding this concept of
community?

Certain scientific publications mandate TeX format for submissions, and it is
a de facto standard for typesetting in those fields.  Its community is as
well-defined as such an inherently fuzzy concept can be.

*roff's largest community is man-page authors, where the software tends to
drive the style rather than the other way around.  That is, man pages use
extra sentence space not because there is a man page style guide that mandates
it, but because they're rendered with tools that add it by default (historical
troff, and now groff).  And for a significant subset of authors and readers
(probably a vast majority, but I don't have any data here and am not sure it's
even attainable), typeset output of man pages is far less important than
terminal output.  Arguably, in this community, typographical minutiae are
largely irrelevant (though, again, this is guesswork in the absence of data).

Outside man page use... what is the *roff "community"?  I genuinely don't
know, and due to the nature of software that anyone can download and use
freely without ever reporting its use, I'm not sure it's even answerable.  But
my sense is that it's not mandated by any organizations nor used exclusively
by any set of people in some definable category.  It's largely used ad hoc by
individuals who want to avoid WYSIWYG, who are fans of its powerful (like TeX)
yet terse (unlike TeX) markup style, and who have the freedom to choose their
own typesetting tool.  Active members of the email list use it for everything
from technical publications to novels.

That is, it's used by a scattering of people across a large number of
disciplines, in a wide range of contexts, to present a diverse array of
subject matter.  This makes us a "community" defined not by some commonality
of purpose, field, employer, or discipline, but a community whose only
defining characteristic is that we use *roff tools.

_If_ that's the case -- and again, I genuinely don't know and would welcome
any data -- it argues for groff's defaults to reflect convention across the
current world of typography.  Any document author is free to use the second
parameter to .ss to override those defaults.  But our default should not be
something out of step with what's done in modern professional typography in
general -- because that doesn't serve our community, which spans geography,
disciplines, and genres.

Your point about the variance in citation styles, I think, supports my
position better than yours.  If I were arguing for defaults that championed
APA over MLA, there would be good grounds to dismiss my argument in light of
the fact that both styles are widely used.  But this is simply not the case*
with sentence spacing.  The typesetting world has coalesced around one style.

 * absent evidence of the hypothesized silent revolt of in-the-trenches
typesetters from their tyrannical style-manual overlords, colluding on
dark-web forums to consistently add an amount of extra space between sentences
slight enough that it requires careful measurement to even detect (aka
Boringest Conspiracy Ever)

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58500>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via Savannah
  https://savannah.gnu.org/