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grohtml(1) "Bugs" section


From: Dave Kemper
Subject: grohtml(1) "Bugs" section
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2023 03:16:12 -0500

The grohtml man page (as of a Sep 19, 2020 commit) has this item under
Bugs, quoted here in its entirety:

"grohtml does not truly support hyphenation, but you can fool it into
hyphenating long input lines, which can appear in HTML output with a
hyphenated word followed by a space but no line break."

I find this sentence perplexing.  But I'm not a grohtml user, so I'm
seeking feedback from people familiar with it: maybe the sentence is
perfectly clear to anyone with a basic grohtml understanding, and only
my ignorance is causing my confusion.

It makes a little more sense if I presume that a couple of the words
are typos, and mentally edit it to: "...hyphenating long input
*WORDS*, which can appear in HTML output *AS* a hyphenated word
followed by a space..."

But even this does not clear up a couple of my questions:

 * What bug is being documented here?  (1) The act of fooling grohtml
(i.e., you might inadvertently fool grohtml into doing this buggy
thing), or (2) the lack of hyphenation, for which fooling grohtml is
the workaround?  (My suspicion is (1), since HTML documents should
never contain hyphenated words, but this isn't clear to me from this
sentence, the only one in the man page that mentions hyphenation.)

 * HOW does one so fool grohtml?

As a possible source of illumination, I looked up the commit that
added this sentence
(http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=051d5d5b),
hoping its log entry might shed some light, but it did not.  In fact,
nothing in the log even acknowledges any content changes, only style
ones, yet the commit itself alters the content of both items in
grohtml(1)'s Bugs section.  This is unusual enough for the typically
comprehensive Branden log entry (and this one covers several less
significant changes) that I wonder if those Bugs changes weren't
intended to be in this commit at all, but snuck in with all the style
changes.



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