bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #58500, default value for second parameter...

 
 

bug #58500: default value for second parameter to .ss should follow modern typographic convention

Submitter:  Dave <barx>
Submitted:  Fri 05 Jun 2020 04:23:42 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  Core Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  Feature change Status:  Need Info
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  gbranden
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
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Sun 06 Sep 2020 07:08:36 PM UTC, comment #11: 

comment #10:

> We should probably group and track these sorts of changes so
> they can be queued for a release where we know we want to
> make changes to language defaults.


Sounds reasonable.

> as "Mr. \sN", something for which I fear Ralph Corderoy will
> never forgive me.


Probably you're being tongue-in-cheek, but the change to \s's semantics had a pretty robust discussion on the mailing list from which a clear consensus emerged.  If Ralph holds you personally responsible, he's just looking for a scapegoat.

> It's been much less than 70 years since CMoS reversed itself on this point.


"[B]y 1949, the eleventh edition had adopted the modern standard of a single multi-purpose space for all punctuation."  -- Heraclitean River

> I'll concede the direction of the trend and the timeframe of
> when it started, but I reject any implication that
> single-spacing was the majority view in 1950.


OK, perhaps not the majority by then, but certainly well established.  CMoS is not exactly quick to let go of convention, holding on to the hyphen in "e-mail" until just three years ago.

> As a supporter of the syllabifying dieresis, I swear to you
> that some day I shall have my vengeance.


My very first groff bug report (the documentation in those days pointed users to the bug-groff email list to report bugs) concerns just such a diaeresis--which at the time I ignorantly called an umlaut: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-groff/2011-02/msg00004.html.  I look forward to seeing what form your vengeance takes.  Let me know if you need an accomplice.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Sun 06 Sep 2020 03:48:04 AM UTC, comment #10: 


comment #9:

> comment #8:
> > what about the groff language default of 1 for the .hy request?
>
> Beyond what's covered in bug #57556?  Not sure what you're asking.


Yes, that's what I was thinking of.

We should probably group and track these sorts of changes so they can be queued for a release where we know we want to make changes to language defaults.  (Just on general release engineering principles; that release might be the next one, for all I know, and I realize I may be perceived as cheeky for saying this is as "Mr. \sN", something for which I fear Ralph Corderoy will never forgive me.)

But I also have in mind some comments I've seen around the source code, like the default pen position after drawing polygons, which Werner really wanted to change several years ago but then it kinda got fossilzed where it was.

Another thing to note is that there is stuff in the codebase that has been #ifdef out...FOR THIRTY YEARS.  Grep around for the "COLUMN" preprocessor symbol, for example.

Anyway, to get back to the issue at hand...  I think you are significantly overstating the longevity of this "new norm".  It's been much less than 70 years since CMoS reversed itself on this point.  I'll concede the direction of the trend and the timeframe of when it started, but I reject any implication that single-spacing was the majority view in 1950.

"idiƶsyncratic"

<stifles laugh, chews lip>

As a supporter of the syllabifying dieresis, I swear to you that some day I shall have my vengeance.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Sat 05 Sep 2020 09:06:47 PM UTC, comment #9: 

comment #8:

> what about the groff language default of 1 for the .hy request?


Beyond what's covered in bug #57556?  Not sure what you're asking.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Sat 05 Sep 2020 08:02:18 PM UTC, comment #8: 

Not to engage in whataboutism,
but to engage in whataboutism,
what about the groff language default of 1 for the .hy request?

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Sat 05 Sep 2020 06:00:53 PM UTC, comment #7: 

Topic of the day: Macro economics

The suggestion that we point users to a macro package (say, -modern_sentences) to achieve typography that (absent evidence otherwise) has been the industry standard for over 70 years, to me, misses the point of software defaults.

Defaults should not be arbitrary.  They should be carefully considered to be the thing that it makes the most sense to do if the user doesn't explicitly ask for something different.  And, as they'll be what gets used when the most novice user of the system writes the most minimal source document and processes it with the most unadorned command line, they should be the best choice for the widest range of situations.

They very specifically should not require the novice user to notice the section in the documentation stating "If you want post-1940 typographic results, you must use the -modern_sentences flag."  The groff manual is carefully designed to be nonlinear, so there's no place to put this guidance "up front" where beginning users are certain to see it.  We don't even know if beginning users will start with our documentation at all, rather than some web tutorial or by modifying existing examples found in the wild.  Groff should do the right thing in all these circumstances.

By analogy, consider a compiler for a new programming language you're designing.  Users might complain if the canonically simplest program, "Hello world," displayed that text in blinking red letters.  "But no," you say, "it is so simple -- you merely give the compiler the -noblink flag, and the message displays normally."  Something near 100% of your users will wonder why they need to specify an additional flag to get the compiler to do the thing they invariably want it to do.

Similarly, while groff can certainly document "You must use the 'odern_sentences' macro package to conform to the last 70 years of typographic practice," why not just do that by default, and make the rare users who want something else be the ones responsible for passing a, perhaps, -historical_sentences flag?  (Except of course it needs to start with an m.  -medieval_sentences?  -moldy_sentences?)

Groff's default of ".ss 12 12" is, by any sane metric, arbitrary.  It does not follow historical typesetting practice of using 1/3 em as a word space and 1 em as a sentence space (that would be ".ss 16 32").  It does not follow TeX's practice of using 1/4 em as a word space and 1/3 em as a sentence space (".ss 12 4").  It does not follow modern everywhere-but-TeX typesetting practice of using 1/4 em as both word space and sentence space (".ss 12 0").  It instead follows the example of its *roff predecessors, whose use of ".ss 12 12" (not even expressible as such in historical implementation, where .ss took only one parameter) looks to be the very definition of arbitrary, as it was not the what professional typesetters did at the time of *roff's original writing nor in the era of wider spacing before that.  *roff is truly out on its own in this regard.

A macro-package setting would be the right answer were this a matter where AP style differed from Chicago style differed from GPO style.  But it's pointless to require a macro package for a setting that's the same across all modern style guides.  Modern practice being in universal agreement tells us this setting ought to be more universal than that.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Wed 08 Jul 2020 11:21:28 AM UTC, comment #6: 

Today's episode: boring into the Boringest Conspiracy Ever

comment #4:

> it doesn't matter if Russell Harper tells us that 99% of all literature
> published since 2000 by the University of Chicago Press follows the single
> intersentence-space rule if a representative sample can be taken of those
> publications and a statistically significant different proportion turns up.


100% agree.

> And that sort of empirical measurement is what I don't see in these arguments.


True.  We're taking a lot of authorities at their word because we don't have an independent commission, perhaps a branch of the the Department of the Interior, whose mission includes taking typographical measurements across publishers and over time.  We lack chart-filled reports with titles like Practices In Kerning: 1970-2000.

I'm gathering that your response to this dearth of data is to throw our hands in the air, declare "All is unknowable!," and either wait for typography's Robert Mueller to issue his report, or dive into the field and gather the data ourselves.

My proposal is simpler: let's give the authorities the benefit of the doubt until data emerges to call their authority into question.

If someone wants to claim there is a discrepancy between style-manual edicts and practices by publishers claiming to follow such style manuals, the burden of proof pretty much has to be on the person making that claim.

And I don't think accepting the authorities' statements at face value is going that far out on a limb.  Forget careful measurements for a moment: just look at some modern examples of professionally typeset works (i.e., not the garbage that Word or the web produces).  You'll be hard-pressed to find examples with discernible wider sentence spacing.  Not even in The New Yorker, known for its idiƶsyncratic style guide.

Thus, even if there is some additional sentence spacing that's not easily visible to the naked eye, it's at levels on par with ".ss 12 3" or ".ss 12 4".  Groff's default, ".ss 12 12", is grossly out of step with that.

So we have authorities telling us that word spaces and sentence spaces should be the same, and we have a corpus of works published in the past 75 years, where, by gum, they all pretty much look the same.  Ockham's razor strongly suggests that using normal word spaces between sentences is today's industry standard, and has been for decades.

While we're waiting for concrete data, groff has to have some default for sentence spacing.  I submit that the most sensible one is the one that pretty much every modern authority agrees on.  If and when data surfaces that shows these authorities to be widely ignored, the question should absolutely be revisited.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Fri 19 Jun 2020 02:12:40 AM UTC, comment #5: 

Comment #4 covers an awful lot of ground and I don't have the brain space to tackle it all at once, so I'm breaking it down based on the ideas it introduces.  Today's installment: community.

If we want to be data-driven, what is the data surrounding this concept of community?

Certain scientific publications mandate TeX format for submissions, and it is a de facto standard for typesetting in those fields.  Its community is as well-defined as such an inherently fuzzy concept can be.

*roff's largest community is man-page authors, where the software tends to drive the style rather than the other way around.  That is, man pages use extra sentence space not because there is a man page style guide that mandates it, but because they're rendered with tools that add it by default (historical troff, and now groff).  And for a significant subset of authors and readers (probably a vast majority, but I don't have any data here and am not sure it's even attainable), typeset output of man pages is far less important than terminal output.  Arguably, in this community, typographical minutiae are largely irrelevant (though, again, this is guesswork in the absence of data).

Outside man page use... what is the *roff "community"?  I genuinely don't know, and due to the nature of software that anyone can download and use freely without ever reporting its use, I'm not sure it's even answerable.  But my sense is that it's not mandated by any organizations nor used exclusively by any set of people in some definable category.  It's largely used ad hoc by individuals who want to avoid WYSIWYG, who are fans of its powerful (like TeX) yet terse (unlike TeX) markup style, and who have the freedom to choose their own typesetting tool.  Active members of the email list use it for everything from technical publications to novels.

That is, it's used by a scattering of people across a large number of disciplines, in a wide range of contexts, to present a diverse array of subject matter.  This makes us a "community" defined not by some commonality of purpose, field, employer, or discipline, but a community whose only defining characteristic is that we use *roff tools.

If that's the case -- and again, I genuinely don't know and would welcome any data -- it argues for groff's defaults to reflect convention across the current world of typography.  Any document author is free to use the second parameter to .ss to override those defaults.  But our default should not be something out of step with what's done in modern professional typography in general -- because that doesn't serve our community, which spans geography, disciplines, and genres.

Your point about the variance in citation styles, I think, supports my position better than yours.  If I were arguing for defaults that championed APA over MLA, there would be good grounds to dismiss my argument in light of the fact that both styles are widely used.  But this is simply not the case* with sentence spacing.  The typesetting world has coalesced around one style.

 * absent evidence of the hypothesized silent revolt of in-the-trenches typesetters from their tyrannical style-manual overlords, colluding on dark-web forums to consistently add an amount of extra space between sentences slight enough that it requires careful measurement to even detect (aka Boringest Conspiracy Ever)

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Sun 14 Jun 2020 01:47:31 AM UTC, comment #4: 

comment #3:

> I think this passage warrants an additional response.


Sure.  I don't see much I can fruitfully respond to in comment 2 that I can't sweep up with this one--I like to get concrete, and I find the virtue-preachings of authority figures less persuasive than empirical measurement.

> comment #1:
> > I think we should liaise with the TeX community before proceeding along such an iconoclastic path.
>
> But it is groff's and TeX's defaults that are the outliers on this.  (I didn't know till a quick google just now that TeX also defaults to wider sentence spacing.)


TeX and *roff (historically, a mix--today, mostly TeX, I think) enjoy a status in many fields of technical writing whereas they are almost completely unused elsewhere.  This boundary is meaningful: it represents community, shared practice, some degree of shared values, and moreover this boundary is constitutive of a discernible and justifiable set of independent idioms.

To be less abstract, there are several different citation styles in English professional writing: legal, MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, and so on.  By the same argument you are making here, you could decree that groff should support by default the single most popular of these.  Perhaps even if there were only a plurality winner, meaning a majority of users would be disserved?

Community matters.

> As an academic exercise, it would be interesting to know TeX's reasoning.  As a practical matter, it's irrelevant.  The convention used by the rest of the world is clear; groff's and TeX's defaults do not align with it.


It doesn't align with, arguendo, the vast majority of authorities writing style guides, in English, outside the hard sciences.

That does not mean that how digital type actually gets set, even in specimens that these authorities would declare normative, adheres to those prescriptions.

This subject is so full of puffery and grandstanding (to which I, admittedly, may be contributing my own vituperation) that I am suspicious of the claims being made for the prevalence of single inter-sentence spacing.  Here's why.

Again, arguendo, I'm willing to stipulate to an overwhelming prevalence of identical spacing between words and sentences for the extremely common case of filled-but-not-adjusted (i.e., ragged-right) text composed in Times New Roman using Microsoft Word (or LibreOffice Writer) and then composited into a box on a page (often directly to PDF by the same user) from there.

Such documents may comprise 95% or better of all "typeset" documents ever produced, such as informal memoranda, though much of that has shifted to email over the past two decades--as a matter of fact, let me interrupt my own argument here.

I submit that a large part of what drove the uptake of paperless memorandizing in professional contexts was the advent of "rich text" email.  You couldn't get people who weren't, at some level, computer nerds to adopt email until people could put real boldface, italics, and underlining into the text (often, all three at once) so that the excitable (or, less happily, authoritarian) could place appropriate emphasis on their mandates and prohibitions.  (To level up your migraine to a cluster, change the font to Comic Sans and add greengrocer's apostrophes.)

Among the many possible candidates, what technologies were used to achieve that transition?  "Rich Text", for a while stored and transmitted as "RTF", which as I recall was a feature-limited version of a format originated by Microsoft Works (a hobbled version of MS Office at a lower price point), and, shortly thereafter and tellingly, HTML.

HTML is notorious for its (non-)handling of whitespace.  Of course you were going to get only one intersentence space in HTML. Type one, type 50, mix in some tabs, one space was what you were going to get.

Rich Text and HTML are typography, but of a particular, limited, not to say debased, variety.

I expect you to tell me that even if I'm precisely correct, my argument is irrelevant.  Don't worry, I haven't forgotten and will return to it.

> > That community and ours are the only ones I trust to produce well-reasoned opinions in this field.
>
> Perhaps that's the core of our disagreement: I don't think it matters how well reasoned anyone's defense of wider sentence spacing is.  You could give me 100 reasons why it's better, and even if I agree with 99 of them, it doesn't change today's industry standard.


It doesn't change what people are saying, certainly.  But are we examining professionally-set documents and taking their measurements?  And by "we", I mean real researchers.  Societally, are we just taking Russell Harper's word for it?  Sure, he's an authority, but the way authorities achieve their status is by building a peer-reviewed corpus of findings.  An authority whose claims you cannot interrogate (albeit with appropriate training or the aid of someone who has it), is a false one.

The non-adjustability of groff's own intersentence spacing was, apparently, little remarked-upon until you came to the issue and it remains hard to observe, especially in proportionally-spaced fonts, until one contrives rendering parameters to reveal it.

Bluntly, I don't trust most of the authorities you cite to experiment the way we do.  Before you say that doesn't matter, either, I would remind you that majoritarian arguments about what is the case have to be independently derived if they come from sources that confuse their wishes with reality.

For example, it doesn't matter if Russell Harper tells us that 99% of all literature published since 2000 by the University of Chicago Press follows the single intersentence-space rule if a representative sample can be taken of those publications and a statistically significant different proportion turns up.

And that sort of empirical measurement is what I don't see in these arguments.  Possibly, when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of page composition for publication, there is a community of experts who apply their own practices regardless of what the old man in the glass-walled office upstairs says.

I admit that that is pure speculation.  But somebody has to be measuring these things, don't they?

And if they're not, why should we take these exhortations as anything more than aspirational?

> I certainly can't impugn TeX's typography, regardless what I think of its syntax.   But trusting only their opinion, while dismissing those of typographic experts like Bringhurst, the designers of commercial typesetting packages, and the publishing houses who use them, feels a bit like choosing your allies based on the answer you already know you want.


Where are the designers of the commercial typesetting packages on the record?  Where are the configurable parameters for these packages by major publishing houses documented?

I'd like to see these for curiosity's sake, at the very least.

> (As a possibly interesting side note, if I understand http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4726 correctly, TeX's default is a sentence space 33% wider than a word space, whereas groff's default is one 100% wider.  So groff's double-wide space is already out of step with TeX's much subtler widening.)


So in groff, for a typesetter/troff device, we could express that as:


.ss 12 4


The above won't work (by my lights) for typewriter/nroff devices because there are is no fractional spacing; groff will round that 4 down to a zero.

Let me return to the majoritarian argument as promised.

The majority of groff documents are not written in the raw language.  I myself never wrote a single such one until I joined the development team (and now I do it all the time to test things).

They are written in macro languages by package which take a variety of approaches to intermix of their own lexicon with that of the underlying roff engine.  So I suggest that a good place to set defaults, as with hyphenation and adjustment modes, is the macro package.  Long ago I wondered why our macro packages (and TeX's) didn't have modules for APA, MLA, and so forth.  (The answer appears to be a combination of long-toothed packages that have seen little change for decades, and the relative dearth of use of either *roff or TeX outside the hard sciences.)

If you want to get people's groff documents conforming to a set of common practices, then a good way is to provide a macro package that encapsulates them.  I don't propose that you (or we) alter or rewrite ms or mm.  We could start small.  As documented in the Texinfo manual, there are four fundamental things groff does with text:

  • filling
  • hyphenation
  • breaking
  • adjusting


The .ss request directly affects the very first of these.

So a first cut of "chicago.tmac" might look like this:


.fi
.ss 12 0
.hy 6 \" no idea--what does the CMoS say?
.ad l


(My copy of CMoS, a book I otherwise highly esteem, unfortunately did not make it with me in an intercontinental move.)

We then tell newcomers to groff who seek to produce workaday documents to pass "-mchicago" as an option.

We certainly wouldn't tell them not to use a macro package at all; that's been a bad idea since the 1970s.

groff the engine has long catered to a specialized audience of technical writers in particular fields.  It may very well remain there without a GUI front end for document composition.  (I find LyX impressive, personally, and have used it for real work.)  But it is designed to cater to the broadest expressible class of typographical challenges, including non-textual drawings and non-English text.

I think I find your majoritarian argument unpersuasive because it poorly fits both the majority of uses to which groff is actually put at present, and the, shall we say, aspirational majority of typographical ends to which it could be put, which includes such things as the annotation of architectural schematics in Mandarin Chinese.

I have assigned this ticket to myself because I am interested and I am, indeed, seeking more information as the status indicates.  If the matter comes down to "will the groff default for the second argument to .ss change in src/roff/troff/input.cpp (or wherever)?" change, it is my intention to unassign myself from the ticket rather than bottling it up as a sort of pocket veto.

Right now, I oppose such a change, and would -1 it on the mailing list (however we interpret such a thing in our community), but I do not wish to be anything more or less than a non-volunteer for such work.

Thank you for the discussion, by which I certainly do not mean to draw it to a close, but rather to reassure you than I am not personally piqued and continue to appreciate your collegial work on groff.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Sat 13 Jun 2020 10:16:34 PM UTC, comment #3: 

I think this passage warrants an additional response.

comment #1:

> I think we should liaise with the TeX community before proceeding along such an iconoclastic path.


But it is groff's and TeX's defaults that are the outliers on this.  (I didn't know till a quick google just now that TeX also defaults to wider sentence spacing.)  As an academic exercise, it would be interesting to know TeX's reasoning.  As a practical matter, it's irrelevant.  The convention used by the rest of the world is clear; groff's and TeX's defaults do not align with it.

> That community and ours are the only ones I trust to produce well-reasoned opinions in this field.


Perhaps that's the core of our disagreement: I don't think it matters how well reasoned anyone's defense of wider sentence spacing is.  You could give me 100 reasons why it's better, and even if I agree with 99 of them, it doesn't change today's industry standard.

I certainly can't impugn TeX's typography, regardless what I think of its syntax.   But trusting only their opinion, while dismissing those of typographic experts like Bringhurst, the designers of commercial typesetting packages, and the publishing houses who use them, feels a bit like choosing your allies based on the answer you already know you want.

(As a possibly interesting side note, if I understand http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4726 correctly, TeX's default is a sentence space 33% wider than a word space, whereas groff's default is one 100% wider.  So groff's double-wide space is already out of step with TeX's much subtler widening.)

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Sat 13 Jun 2020 12:26:58 PM UTC, comment #2: 

comment #1:

> While I think you're right to characterize the growing consensus among professional writers who use computerized typesetting systems but don't develop them, I don't think groff should be bound by that consensus.


That's not how I would characterize this consensus.  I'm not looking at who is making the decisions, but at the decisions themselves.

As of 2020, with very little exception, major publishers use the same spacing between words and sentences.  We can't peer into those publishing houses and tell if those decisions were made by professional writers, software developers, or janitors.  All we can do is look at the results, which tell us that major publishers today follow this practice.  This makes it the current industry standard.

You may hate it.  I'm no fan of it myself.  But no less a typographical authority than Robert Bringhurst endorses it in The Elements of Typographic Style.  His opinion carries a weight that yours and mine don't.  Pretty much every modern style manual agrees: there's an entire Wikipedia article documenting this consensus.  (And given how many details these various style guides diverge on, the unanimity on this issue is remarkable.)

It's hard to dismiss every major publisher and style guide as guilty of typographic ineptitude.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the current standard arose from ignorance, or as a cost-saving measure, or as the result of a long-ago meeting of the Secret Cabal of Typesetters whose minutes we are not privy to.  Even if you claim all these publishers and guides are "wrong," collectively they define the industry standard.  "Wrong" is the new right.

Groff's default sentence spacing is out of step with the industry standard, and that's a bug regardless how much you or I may wish the industry standard were something other than what it is.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Fri 12 Jun 2020 09:08:24 AM UTC, comment #1: 

I disagree with this proposal.  While I think you're right to characterize the growing consensus among professional writers who use computerized typesetting systems but don't develop them, I don't think groff should be bound by that consensus.

Frankly, as our irritable but erudite (and above all, research-driven) Heraclitean friend you noted in bug #58450 observed, much of that consensus seems to arise from ignorance and a seemingly willful refusal to interrogate the typographic simplifications imposed by the semi-automation of typesetting with the Linotype machine and similar.

I'm all for documenting ".ss 12 0" to tell people how to kill off that additional inter-sentence space if that is what they (or their editors or instructors) or demand, but I am pretty uncomfortable with changing the defaults.

Moreover, I think we should liaise with the TeX community before proceeding along such an iconoclastic path.  That community and ours are the only ones I trust to produce well-reasoned opinions in this field.

Here's a counter-example, by Russell Harper, of a well-reasoned opinion:

https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/03/24/one-space-or-two/

Yes, there's some stuff about historical practice in there, though it compares poorly in depth and breadth to the link in bug #58450.

I would draw the reader's attention to how much of the emphasis in Harper's hortatory has to do with the input conventions one uses with Microsoft Word.  He pops open dialog boxes to do search and replace.  He says "your editor" will take your second space after a sentence out again, which presumes the distribution of documents for review in source form--_rather than the form in which they will appear in print_.  One can easily infer that he fears the tedium of having to distinguish between different sorts of space when the only tool he has to express them in his source document is the number of times he presses the space bar.  He wants to pop open the dialog box, click the "Replace All" button and be done forever.

This is not only unspeakably crude typography, but unspeakably crude computer use.  This is a man who can operate a car and thereby believes himself an automotive engineer.

Harper is representative of the bulk of the professional writing community, which seems to consider Microsoft Word the ne plus ultra of composition and publishing.  When I was in school, students were taught to compose pages, as opposed to text, in tools like Quark Xpress and Aldus PageMaker.  Why do these receive no mention from Harper?

The false sense of expertise that WYSIWYG systems has imparted to these people is grievous indeed.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Fri 05 Jun 2020 04:23:42 AM UTC, original submission:  

As mentioned in passing in bug #58450, typographic convention of the last 70-100 years has been to use the same amount of space between sentences as between words.

groff allows the user to specify any amount, including none, of additional inter-sentence space to add.  This flexibility is good.

However, by default, groff should follow modern typographic convention.  This would require the default value of sentence_space_size (register \n[.sss]) be 0.  Instead, currently:

  • If a document never calls the .ss request, groff defaults to a value of 12 for word_space_size and 12 for sentence_space_size.
  • If a document calls the .ss request but with only one argument (word_space_size), groff sets sentence_space_size to be equal to word_space_size.


In both these cases, the default sentence_space_size should be 0.

Dave <barx>
Group Member

 

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