bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #61446, doc/ms.ms: use SI unit symbols...

 
 

bug #61446: doc/ms.ms: use SI unit symbols instead of language-specific ones

Submitter:  Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig>
Submitted:  Mon 08 Nov 2021 09:45:59 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Macro package ms Severity:  2 - Minor
Item Group:  Documentation Status:  Rejected
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  gbranden
Open/Closed:  Closed Planned Release:  None
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Thu 30 Mar 2023 05:27:52 PM UTC, comment #5: 

Dropping patch annotation from rejected ticket.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Wed 19 Jan 2022 01:40:13 AM UTC, comment #4: 

I guess I should further add that the missing glyphs for the \(rg and \(co special characters are also, as one might guess, artifacts of the modern re-rendering.  Their glyphs are entirely typical in my paper copy.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Wed 19 Jan 2022 01:37:42 AM UTC, comment #3: 

comment #2:

> According to the 1976 nroff/troff manual by Lesk,


Ossanna.  Sorry, Joe.  I've been reading a lot of Lesk lately.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Wed 19 Jan 2022 01:34:24 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Minor correction to myself, which doesn't affect the disposition of this ticket.

According to the 1976 nroff/troff manual by Lesk, the mnemonic for the special character "\(fm" is "foot mark".

I'm including a screen shot from a modern *roff's rendering (I'm not sure which one), but I visually compared it to my paper copy of the same manual (published by Holt, Reinhart, and Winston in 1983) and it matches in all relevant details.  (The missing word after "hyphen or" appears to be an authentic solecism.  The missing glyph box for a solidus is an artifact of the reconstructed rendering; my paper copy has an ordinary slash in those places.)

There's also some interesting material in here relevant to the eternal war with the people who insist that groff is wrong to map certain ordinary characters to non-ASCII code points.


G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Thu 25 Nov 2021 01:43:57 PM UTC, comment #1: 

This patch is ill-conceived.

I'll go through the bits of it.


  SI is an abbreviation of "Système International d'Unités".

  Name of units are used in singular when listed.


Most of the units supported by *roff typesetting systems are not, in fact, SI units.

Further, these documents are written in English and an ability to interpret the plural forms of words in a base English vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words is assumed.

NIST agrees.

> 9.2 Plurals ... Plural unit names are used when they are required by the rules of English grammar. They are normally formed regularly, for example, "henries" is the plural of henry. According to Ref. [6], the following plurals are irregular: Singular —lux, hertz, siemens; Plural —lux, hertz, siemens. (See also Sec. 9.7.)


You may be confusing standard practice for the use of SI symbols (like "m", "L", or "°C") with standard practice for the written-out unit names.


  The symbol for the unit inch is 'in'.


...which is not an SI unit.  (Warning: non-authoritative source, but that's an improvement on your not citing any sources at all.  Maybe someone else has an official document handy.)


  The symbol '\[sd]' (PostScript name 'second') is for 'arch second'.


You mean 'arc second', and you are not presenting a complete picture.
 
In English that symbol is used for several purposes.  A symbol adjacent to it in groff_char(7) is named '\[fm]', which is not a reasonable abbreviation for "arc minutes".  One can surmise that it is a mnemonic for "feet/minutes", since it is used for both just as \[sd] is used for inches and secondary subdivisions of the degree in plane and spherical trigonometry.


-v        \[lq]vees\[rq]; height of a line using the current font
-m        \[lq]ems\[rq]; type size of the font; approx. width of an \[lq]M\[rq]
-n        \[lq]ens\[rq]; same as em/2; approx. width of an \[lq]n\[rq]
+i        inch (in)
+c        centimeter (cm)
+p        point (1/72\~in)
+P        pica (1/6\~in)
+v        \[lq]vee\[rq]; height of a line using the current font
+m        \[lq]em\[rq]; type size of the font; approx. width of an \[lq]M\[rq]
+n        \[lq]en\[rq]; same as em/2; approx. width of an \[lq]n\[rq]


The only SI symbol in the above is the centimeter, which was not listed with its symbol in the first place, let alone was that symbol inappropriately pluralized.

This patch is consequently wholly invalid.  I'm not sure whether to set its status to "Invalid" or "Wont Fix".  I'll go with the latter for now.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Mon 08 Nov 2021 09:45:59 PM UTC, original submission:  

From 7c8cd6de2681dc89c325f57c567cf52b029335f1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2021 21:36:42 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] doc/ms.ms: Use SI-unit symbols instead of language specific ones
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

  SI is an abbreviation of "Système International d'Unités".

  Names of units are used in singular when listed.

  The symbol for the unit inch is 'in'.

  The symbol '\[sd]' (PostScript name 'second') is for 'arch second'.

Signed-off-by: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
---
 doc/ms.ms | 14 +++++++-------
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

  The patch is in the attachment.

Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig>

 

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

Attach Files:
   
   
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Attached Files
file #52224:  0001-Use-SI-unit-symbols-instead-of-language-specific-ones.txt added by bjarniig (1KiB - text/plain - groff: doc/ms.ms symbols of some units)

 

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    Follow 8 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2023-03-30 gbranden Summary[PATCH] doc/ms.ms: Use SI-unit symbols instead of language specific ones doc/ms.ms: use SI unit symbols instead of language-specific ones
    2022-01-19 gbranden Attached File- Added nroff_troff_manual_1976_table_2_part_1.png, #52680
    2021-11-25 gbranden Severity3 - Normal 2 - Minor
        StatusNone Rejected
        Assigned toNone gbranden
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2021-11-08 barx CategoryNone Macro package ms
    2021-11-08 bjarniig Attached File- Added 0001-Use-SI-unit-symbols-instead-of-language-specific-ones.txt, #52224

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