RE: Using '.vs 0' inside TBL macro

[Lenga, Yair [FI]]

Hi,

Now I'm really confused. My intention IS to get a zero vertical spacing. The 
problem is that this does not work is used inside macro call that is placed 
inside a 'tbl' body, in V19.

I read in the notes that '.vs 0' should have generated warning, and use the 
previous default. However, the actual behavior that I see is different: NO 
warning (I'm running with 1.18.1 on Red Hat build), and for the input:

.sp 1i
.nf
.vs 0
aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
.br

I do get the cccc printed over bbbb and aaaa. - 0 vertical space, and not 
warning. Exacaly what I want.

I hope that you can run the example that I attached (in my original email) in 
v18 and v19 - if not - I will be happy to provide you with output (is 
Postscript OK ?) - and see the difference.

Thanks
Yair

-----Original Message-----
From: Werner LEMBERG [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 12:28 PM
To: Lenga, Yair [FI]
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: Using '.vs 0' inside TBL macro



> o Since version 1.19 you can say `.vs 0'.  Older versions emit a warning 
> and convert this to `.vs \n[.V]'.
> 
> This seems to break my tables, which have been using '.vs 0' to
> disable vertical movement inside gtbl macro.

Hmm, why can't you change

  .vs 0

to

  .vs \n[.V]

in your macro package?  This

  1) gives identical results with all groff versions

  2) doesn't use an obscure feature of .vs which wasn't intuitive

> I'm not sure if the new behavior (.vs 0 => converted to .vs
> <default>) is intentional.

It's exactly the opposite!  The old versions converted `.vs 0'
silently to `.vs \n[.V]' -- it was simply not possible to completely
disable vertical movement with .vs.


    Werner