Re: mandoc/nroff small spacing difference for .Bd -offset 0

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Nicolas,

Nicolas Joly wrote on Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 08:05:03PM +0200:

> Still checking the NetBSD man pages i noticed a minor difference for
> display blocks with an `-offset 0' argument.

That's sloppy.  The -offset argument is supposed to take a scaling
width argument, not a bare number.

When the unit is omitted from scaling width numbers, according to
my understanding, what unit is assumed depends on the context,
and i have no idea what the default unit for .Bd -offset is
supposed to be.

According to my testing, here is what groff does:

 -offset followed by a single digit (-offset 0 ... -offset 9)
  is handled as -offset 0n

 -offset followed by multiple digits (-offset 10 ... -offset 9999 ...)
  uses the string length of the number,
  e.g. -offset 123 is the same as -offset 3n

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I'm not thrilled by the idea of spending my time to make mandoc
(bug-?)compatible with groff in this respect.

Or can anybody provide a better explanation of what -offset 123
is supposed to mean?

Somewhat confused,
  Ingo
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