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[bug #60665] doc/groff.texi: clarify nroff adjustment algorithm differen


From: Dave
Subject: [bug #60665] doc/groff.texi: clarify nroff adjustment algorithm differences
Date: Tue, 25 May 2021 19:12:08 -0400 (EDT)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #60665 (project groff):

[comment #1 comment #1:]
> Maybe troff devices always have a horizontal resolution greater than
> one-twelfth of an em, and that is the smallest amount of distributable
> inter-word space we can manipulate with the .ss request.

That's slightly off in the details (.ss's units are 1/12 of the font's space
width, which itself is typically 1/4 em in modern fonts, giving .ss a 1/48 em
granularity) but basically sound reasoning (1/48 em still dwarfs the basic
unit in PostScript and PDF; I'm admittedly unfamiliar with other output
devices, though).

> I think you're right--uneven space distribution consequent to adjustment
> is something that's only going to be visible in the nroff context.  I want
> to say that without lying to people about what's happening, though.

Fair enough, but I don't think omitting implementation details and talking
only about visible results is a lie; on the contrary, it's the purpose of
end-user documentation, whose readers don't generally care how the code works
(else they'd be reading that rather than a manual).  This kind of detail seems
more appropriate for developer documentation, if such a thing existed, or code
comments, if such things existed.

> Urp.  Will fix that in the near term.

I see commit c431cbc0
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c431cbc0> has done
this.

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