[bug #58500] default value for second parameter to .ss should follow modern typographic convention

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #58500 (project groff):

[comment #3 comment #3:]
> I think this passage warrants an additional response.

Sure.  I don't see much I can fruitfully respond to in comment 2 that I can't
sweep up with this one--I like to get concrete, and I find the
virtue-preachings of authority figures less persuasive than empirical
measurement.

> [comment #1 comment #1:]
> > I think we should liaise with the TeX community before proceeding along
such an iconoclastic path.
> 
> But it is groff's and TeX's defaults that are the outliers on this.  (I
didn't know till a quick google just now that TeX also defaults to wider
sentence spacing.)

TeX and *roff (historically, a mix--today, mostly TeX, I think) enjoy a status
in many fields of technical writing whereas they are almost completely unused
elsewhere.  This boundary is meaningful: it represents community, shared
practice, some degree of shared values, and moreover this boundary is
constitutive of a discernible and justifiable set of independent idioms.

To be less abstract, there are several different citation styles in English
professional writing: legal, MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, and so on.  By the
same argument you are making here, you could decree that groff should support
by default the single most popular of these.  Perhaps even if there were only
a plurality winner, meaning a majority of users would be disserved?

Community matters.

> As an academic exercise, it would be interesting to know TeX's reasoning. 
As a practical matter, it's irrelevant.  The convention used by the rest of
the world is clear; groff's and TeX's defaults do not align with it.

It doesn't align with, arguendo, the vast majority of authorities writing
style guides, in English, outside the hard sciences.

That does not mean that how digital type actually gets set, even in specimens
that these authorities would declare normative, adheres to those
prescriptions.

This subject is so full of puffery and grandstanding (to which I, admittedly,
may be contributing my own vituperation) that I am suspicious of the claims
being made for the prevalence of single inter-sentence spacing.  Here's why.

Again, arguendo, I'm willing to stipulate to an overwhelming prevalence of
identical spacing between words and sentences for the extremely common case of
filled-but-not-adjusted (i.e., ragged-right) text composed in Times New Roman
using Microsoft Word (or LibreOffice Writer) and then composited into a box on
a page (often directly to PDF by the same user) from there.

Such documents may comprise 95% or better of all "typeset" documents ever
produced, such as informal memoranda, though much of that has shifted to email
over the past two decades--as a matter of fact, let me interrupt my own
argument here.

I submit that a large part of what drove the uptake of paperless memorandizing
in professional contexts was the advent of "rich text" email.  You couldn't
get people who weren't, at some level, computer nerds to adopt email until
people could put real boldface, italics, and underlining into the text (often,
all three at once) so that the excitable (or, less happily, authoritarian)
could place appropriate emphasis on their mandates and prohibitions.  (To
level up your migraine to a cluster, change the font to Comic Sans and add
greengrocer's apostrophes.)

Among the many possible candidates, what technologies were used to achieve
that transition?  "Rich Text", for a while stored and transmitted as "RTF",
which as I recall was a feature-limited version of a format originated by
Microsoft Works (a hobbled version of MS Office at a lower price point), and,
shortly thereafter and tellingly, HTML.

HTML is notorious for its (non-)handling of whitespace.  Of course you were
going to get only one intersentence space in HTML. Type one, type 50, mix in
some tabs, one space was what you were going to get.

Rich Text and HTML are typography, but of a particular, limited, not to say
debased, variety.

I expect you to tell me that even if I'm precisely correct, my argument is
irrelevant.  Don't worry, I haven't forgotten and will return to it.

> > That community and ours are the only ones I trust to produce well-reasoned
opinions in this field.
> 
> Perhaps that's the core of our disagreement: I don't think it matters how
well reasoned anyone's defense of wider sentence spacing is.  You could give
me 100 reasons why it's better, and even if I agree with 99 of them, it
doesn't change today's industry standard.

It doesn't change what people are saying, certainly.  But are we examining
professionally-set documents and taking their measurements?  And by "we", I
mean real researchers.  Societally, are we just taking Russell Harper's word
for it?  Sure, he's an authority, but the way authorities achieve their status
is by building a peer-reviewed corpus of findings.  An authority whose claims
you cannot interrogate (albeit with appropriate training or the aid of someone
who has it), is a false one.

The non-adjustability of groff's own intersentence spacing was, apparently,
little remarked-upon until you came to the issue and it remains hard to
observe, especially in proportionally-spaced fonts, until one contrives
rendering parameters to reveal it.

Bluntly, I don't trust most of the authorities you cite to experiment the way
we do.  Before you say that doesn't matter, either, I would remind you that
majoritarian arguments about what _is_ the case have to be independently
derived if they come from sources that confuse their wishes with reality.

For example, it doesn't matter if Russell Harper tells us that 99% of all
literature published since 2000 by the University of Chicago Press follows the
single intersentence-space rule if a representative sample can be taken of
those publications and a statistically significant different proportion turns
up.

And that sort of empirical measurement is what I don't see in these arguments.
 Possibly, when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of page composition for
publication, there is a community of experts who apply their own practices
regardless of what the old man in the glass-walled office upstairs says.

I admit that that is pure speculation.  But _somebody_ has to be measuring
these things, don't they?

And if they're not, why should we take these exhortations as anything more
than aspirational?

> I certainly can't impugn TeX's typography, regardless what I think of its
syntax.   But trusting _only_ their opinion, while dismissing those of
typographic experts like Bringhurst, the designers of commercial typesetting
packages, and the publishing houses who use them, feels a bit like choosing
your allies based on the answer you already know you want.

Where are the designers of the commercial typesetting packages on the record? 
Where are the configurable parameters for these packages by major publishing
houses documented?

I'd like to see these for curiosity's sake, at the very least.

> (As a possibly interesting side note, if I understand
http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4726 correctly, TeX's default is a sentence
space 33% wider than a word space, whereas groff's default is one 100% wider. 
So groff's double-wide space is already out of step with TeX's much subtler
widening.)

So in groff, for a typesetter/troff device, we could express that as:


.ss 12 4


The above won't work (by my lights) for typewriter/nroff devices because there
are is no fractional spacing; groff will round that 4 down to a zero.

Let me return to the majoritarian argument as promised.

The _majority_ of groff documents are not written in the raw language.  I
myself never wrote a single such one until I joined the development team (and
now I do it all the time to test things).

They are written in macro languages by package which take a variety of
approaches to intermix of their own lexicon with that of the underlying roff
engine.  So I suggest that a good place to set defaults, as with hyphenation
and adjustment modes, is the macro package.  Long ago I wondered why our macro
packages (and TeX's) didn't have modules for APA, MLA, and so forth.  (The
answer appears to be a combination of long-toothed packages that have seen
little change for decades, and the relative dearth of use of either *roff or
TeX outside the hard sciences.)

If you want to get people's groff documents conforming to a set of common
practices, then a good way is to provide a macro package that encapsulates
them.  I don't propose that you (or we) alter or rewrite ms or mm.  We could
start small.  As documented in the Texinfo manual, there are four fundamental
things groff does with text:

* filling
* hyphenation
* breaking
* adjusting

The .ss request directly affects the very first of these.

So a first cut of "chicago.tmac" might look like this:


.fi
.ss 12 0
.hy 6 \" no idea--what does the CMoS say?
.ad l


(My copy of CMoS, a book I otherwise highly esteem, unfortunately did not make
it with me in an intercontinental move.)

We then tell newcomers to groff who seek to produce workaday documents to pass
"-mchicago" as an option.

We certainly wouldn't tell them not to use a macro package at all; that's been
a bad idea since the 1970s.

groff the engine has long catered to a specialized audience of technical
writers in particular fields.  It may very well remain there without a GUI
front end for document composition.  (I find LyX impressive, personally, and
have used it for real work.)  But it is _designed_ to cater to the broadest
expressible class of typographical challenges, including non-textual drawings
and non-English text.

I think I find your majoritarian argument unpersuasive because it poorly fits
both the majority of uses to which groff is actually put at present, and the,
shall we say, aspirational majority of typographical ends to which it could be
put, which includes such things as the annotation of architectural schematics
in Mandarin Chinese.

I have assigned this ticket to myself because I am interested and I am,
indeed, seeking more information as the status indicates.  If the matter comes
down to "will the groff default for the second argument to .ss change in
src/roff/troff/input.cpp (or wherever)?" change, it is my intention to
unassign myself from the ticket rather than bottling it up as a sort of pocket
veto.

Right now, I oppose such a change, and would -1 it on the mailing list
(however we interpret such a thing in our community), but I do not wish to be
anything more or less than a non-volunteer for such work.

Thank you for the discussion, by which I certainly do not mean to draw it to a
close, but rather to reassure you than I am not personally piqued and continue
to appreciate your collegial work on groff.

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