Re: [Groff] pic: No white space allowed between . and PS?

[Carsten Kunze]

> Just in case it hasn't been mentioned before: At least for the `.so'
> request, there is a big difference between
> 
>   .so
> 
> and
> 
>   .    so

This is documented differently in the 3BSD manpage: 'so is documented to be 
ignored by soelim.  Nothing is mentioned about spaces between . and so.  But 
the implementaion of Bill Joys soelim recognizes only ".so", so the above 
written is true too.

> Admittedly, this mechanism doesn't make much sense with other
> preprocessors in general, but I think it's not a bad idea to stay with
> this scheme for orthogonality:
> 
>   .XXX
> 
> can be handled by a preprocessor, while
> 
>  .<whitespace>XXX
> 
> is something only `troff' should process.

Is this documented somewhere?

Anyway--to put a preprocessor section into an .if block is of limited use, so 
it can be accepted not to allow this whitespace.

Carsten