Re: [DRAFT] introduction to *roff concepts

[Dave Kemper]

On 10/10/20, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I predictably forgot to attach my patch when I mentioned my pending
> rewrite of the first section of the "gtroff Reference" chapter of our
> Texinfo manual, and since it was a digression anyway I thought I'd give
> it a new thread.

This patch is up to your usual high standards of clarity and
readability.  Every change here improves the text it replaces.  I
spotted only a couple of minor glitches:

"...closing a the body of..."

"Remember that... after a true conditional... and whitespace on the
same input line is interpreted as if it were on an input line by
itself."  I'm not quite able to parse this; it appears something was
left out.

And then some style nits, because I'm me:

"proportionally-spaced fonts" should lose its hyphen.  I'd stick a
hyphen after the first word of "natural language text."  You might
consider this part of the ice-cream-cone exemption, but this phrase
seems to benefit more from the parsing aid.

The term "tabulation stop" seems overly pedantic in light of the fact
that the full word "tabulation" is already used earlier in the
sentence and its shorter and more common form already introduced.

The placement of some of the @footnote{}s relative to periods in the
text is inconsistent; that is, sometimes it is

  ...end of sentence.@footnote{Note.}

and sometimes

  ...end of sentence@footnote{Note.}.

The Wikipedian in me prefers the first style, but consistency is what matters.