Re: breaks and the no-break control character

[Dave Kemper]

On 5/5/23, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> We can assert that the position of the text baseline is one of those
> properties of the output line that is not determined until the line has
> been broken.  And what the `sp` request really does is decide where your
> next text baseline is going to be.

That explanation makes sense to me.  Thank you!

> [2] which we should be able to detect and warn about since we know where
>     all the glyph bounding boxes are on the page[3]
> [3] On the gripping hand I've heard that collision detection is not
>     necessarily a trivial problem

Detecting overlapping glyphs that require an italic correction would
SEEM to be a simple subset of the problem, but groff doesn't do that
automatically, and I dimly recall asking about that on the list years
ago and being told it wasn't automatable.

Hmm, now that I track down the thread
(http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2013-11/msg00019.html), no one's replies
mentioned bounding boxes; the consensus was the the data needed for
the job wasn't available, which seems less true in light of your
footnote [2] above.  But maybe no one mentioned them because that data
is insufficient, which your footnote [3] supports.