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From: lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin)
Subject: Re: Awf: Henry's Amazingly Workable Formatter (was Re: Groff)
Message-ID: <1990Nov17.052158.10704@sq.sq.com>
Organization: SoftQuad Inc.
References: <90Nov14.184836est.19909@me.utoronto.ca> <1990Nov15.170711.6778@zoo.toronto.edu> <10416@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 90 05:21:58 GMT
Lines: 52

lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
> At the point that I developed the ''' habit, I had seen several documents
> that used it in preference to .\", and I had the hope that it would become
> an allowed alternative convention.  This has turned out not to be the case,

Probably because it is not, in fact, a comment, and troff has much too much
momentum to allow it to be one.  In particular, beware of things like
	''' \fB
where the font change to bold is _not_ commented out.  If you try and use
this to comment out part of an if-else chain, interesting things happen.
Personally I would have prefered
	...
but that isn't acceptable either...

> Speaking of conventions, I would think that awf, like nroff, would simply
> ignore any macros it doesn't recognize.  (Though I can see arguments
> for taking the opposite tack.)

A large number of bugs in troff macros come to light (and get fixed) when
the formatter reports calls to undefined macros.  I agree that it's useful
to be able to disable such warnings for printing with old macro packages.


A Longish But Amusing Aside About The Alternate Control Character ('):

Many casual troff users don't realise that the single quote at the start of
a line is special to troff in much the same way as is a leading dot.
The most interesting support question I ever witnessed was when someone's
document contained a line starting with
'trouble in the antarctic'

It's fun to try this -- pipe this article through nroff, and then through
a pager (more, less, pg, etc.) and you'll see what happens!
If you're using rn, type
	| nroff | less
before reading the Explanation below....



Explanation:

Normally of course one would type `trouble....antarctic'.  The effect of
the erroneous version, however, is to call troff's "tr" request, which,
for the rest of the document, turned every o into a u, every b into an l,
every e into a space, and so on.  Neat, eh?

As you can imagine, the poor user was more than a little perplexed!

Lee

-- 
Liam R. E. Quin,  lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337