It -column \tab terminal punctuation.

It -column \tab terminal punctuation.

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Hi, some consensus needed on a compatibility issue.

The `It -column' with tabsep issue is pretty hairy.  Cf

 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2010-05/msg00018.html

For the time being, let's just leave aside the fact that a macro context
is continued across columns and consider only

  .It a ) ] ;<TAB>b ) ] ;<TAB>c ) ] ;

  a)] ;      b)] ;      c)];
    ^^^        ^^^       ^^^

Noting the bogus whitespace between the last closing delimiter of the
non-terminal column.

Question: do we try to emulate this?  All groffs do it, but it looks
like a bug to me.  It's not documented anywhere.

I cannot find an example of where this behaviour is really exploited, so
I think it's safe to drop it.  I'm also in favour of dropping it because
doing otherwise introduces very unexpected behaviour that both users and
mandoc will have to know about.

Instead, doing

  a)];      b)];      c)];

is much more reasonable: since we're in a macro (`It'), we collapse the
closing punctuation.  Just like with any macros.

Yea/nay?

Kristaps
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Re: It -column \tab terminal punctuation.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Kristaps,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Mon, May 10, 2010 at 01:34:36PM +0200:

>  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2010-05/msg00018.html

Especially following Tadziu Hoffmann's explanation in
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2010-05/msg00020.html , ...

>   .It a ) ] ;<TAB>b ) ] ;<TAB>c ) ] ;
>   a)] ;      b)] ;      c)];
>     ^^^        ^^^       ^^^

 ... I tend to consider that as a bug in groff.

Considering the space character an argument delimiter but
not considering a tab character an argument delimiter, put mildly,
violates the principle of least surprise, in particular given that
the tab character separates more strongly in roff than the space
character in other respects.

>   a)];      b)];      c)];

That seems reasonable indeed.

Yours,
  Ingo
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