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[bug #60404] doc/groff.texi: update/restore .ss example


From: Dave
Subject: [bug #60404] doc/groff.texi: update/restore .ss example
Date: Mon, 24 May 2021 20:58:19 -0400 (EDT)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #60404 (project groff):

Thanks!  I think it covers everything we talked about in our email discussion.
 And it goes beyond the original example by illustrating regular word spaces,
regular sentence spaces, and super-sized sentence spaces all in the same small
block.  It avoids both .nop and any tricky use of \c.  It seems a pretty clear
win.

But...

The original example did implement the pretty useful concept of "insert a wide
discardable space right here without changing any settings in the surrounding
text."  I incorporated this into a macro of my own:


.de discardable-space
\c
.nr saved-ss \\n[.ss]
.ss 2*\\n[saved-ss]
.nop
.ss \\n[saved-ss]
.rr saved-ss
..


I wouldn't have been able to write this at all without the original
info-manual example, and I'm not convinced I could do it that easily from the
retooled one.  (The hackish use of .nop isn't strictly necessary, as the macro
works as well with an empty line there instead, but I've retained .nop as a
sort of "this line intentionally left blank" marker.)

But it's fair to say that the point of this example in the manual _should_ be
the novel use of .ss to insert a wide discardable space, which it shows quite
well; and that what the original example illustrated was a specific
interaction of .ss and .nop, which is maybe less a job for the official manual
than for the useful-roff-tricks repository I wished for
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-05/msg00059.html).  And since
(as I also said) the email list archive essentially fulfills that role, and I
did paste the entire original example into the email that started the threads
referenced in comment #0, probably that's good enough.

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