bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #61028, [refer-ms] sets comma after title...

 
 

bug #61028: [refer-ms] sets comma after title in italics, should be roman

Submitter:  G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Submitted:  Wed 11 Aug 2021 12:19:19 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Macro ms Severity:  2 - Minor
Item Group:  Incorrect behaviour Status:  Invalid
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  gbranden
Open/Closed:  Closed Planned Release:  None
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Thu 30 Mar 2023 11:47:57 AM UTC, comment #6: 

Withdrawing this.  I think I was wrong.

Pluggable modular style components for refer(1) (APA, CMoS, MLA, etc.) would be a great way to deal with this.  But it's a whole different ticket, and ball of wax.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Wed 17 Aug 2022 12:07:44 AM UTC, comment #5: 

The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), section 6.2: "All punctuation marks should appear in the same font--roman or italic--as the main or surrounding text, except for punctuation that belongs to a title in a different font (usually italics)."  To illustrate this, in the sentence "After reading Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, she was inspired...", they set the colon and the fist comma (parts of the title) in italics, but the second comma (not part of the title) in roman.

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (first edition), page 82: "Use roman rather than sloped parentheses, square brackets, and braces, even if the context is italic."

CMOS section 6.4 does call the system Bjarni advocates the "more traditional system" but says it "should be reserved--if it must be used--for publications destined for print only."

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Tue 01 Feb 2022 09:25:14 PM UTC, comment #4: 

I don't have any plans to deal with this before 1.23.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Fri 13 Aug 2021 10:13:25 PM UTC, comment #3: 

  Instead of "style guide", "books on typography" is better.

This convention should thus be mentioned in most (all) style guides.


Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig>
Fri 13 Aug 2021 03:13:59 PM UTC, comment #2: 

comment #1:

>   "refer-ms" does this correctly.
>
>   Punctuation marks are set to match the type of their adjoining words;
> check a style guide.
>


There's no controlling style guide for *roff citations.  (There are many candidates that could be selected; I gather Peter Schaffter chose MLA for mom(7).)  The practice in groff documentation is in fact to not honor the rule you cite, following the same principle that motivates "logical" quotation style.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/logical_quotation

I'm not wedded to the change I proposed, but if we're going to reject it in favor of a style guide's directives regarding source citation, we should identify one that is sufficiently detailed to address the cases we need to handle, conform to it, and document the style in use.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Thu 12 Aug 2021 09:57:07 PM UTC, comment #1: 

  "refer-ms" does this correctly.

  Punctuation marks are set to match the type of their adjoining words;
check a style guide.

Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig>
Wed 11 Aug 2021 12:19:19 PM UTC, original submission:  

Since style changes don't show up in Savannah, I'll attach a reproducer.

To use it:


$ REFER=my-db-file nroff -R -ms scheme.ms | cat -s


Problem appears to be at https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/refer-ms.tmac#n67 , but other string defs in this file should be checked for similar problems.

And then, our other macro packages should be checked.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

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Attached Files
file #51761:  my-db-file added by gbranden (135B - application/octet-stream)
file #51762:  scheme.ms added by gbranden (146B - text/x-troff-ms)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

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    Follow 6 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2023-03-30 gbranden StatusPostponed Invalid
        Assigned toNone gbranden
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2022-02-01 gbranden StatusNone Postponed
    2021-08-11 gbranden Attached File- Added my-db-file, #51761
        Attached File- Added scheme.ms, #51762

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