Re: [Groff] question about .rs and .nop

[Peter Schaffter]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013, Ulrich Lauther wrote:
> why have I to use ADD_SPACE instead of SP just because I am at the
> top of the page?
> Seems to me an unneeded complication.  Is there a deeper reason to
> make SP disfunctional after an *explicit* page break?

The only way to disable no-space mode after explicit page breaks
is to set a flag in NEWPAGE instructing HEADER not to enable it.
The problem is that if no-space mode is disabled, some macros will
start depositing unwanted space.  While you may want to set just a
few lines of text after NEWPAGE, scooted down on the page, users
doing something like this

  .NEWPAGE
  .HEADING 1 "A heading

are going to be stuck with unwanted space before their heading at
the top of the page.  Since macros must remain consistent in
their behaviour (eg that macros inserting space before outputting
text will strip the space if the text is to be output at the top
of a page), what you're suggesting would require the addition of
"...but not if you use NEWPAGE" to the documentation for every macro
affected by your proposed absence of .ns.

In short, to fix things the way you want would break things for
others.  Not sure if that's the "deeper reason" you were wondering
about, but I hope it helps.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca