[Groff] problem with `refer'

[Werner LEMBERG]

`refer' has the following very ugly, ill-designed feature:

  `.[' <pre>
  `.]' <post>

<pre> and <post> start *immediately* after `.[' and `.]'; these
strings are put before and after the citation, respectively.  As a
consequence, even with traditional troff, you can't have macros of the
form `.[x' and `.]x' (`x' can be any character) if `refer' is used.

I plan to change this.  The natural way IMHO is to treat .[ and .]
similar to string definitions:

   old          new
   -------------------

   .])          .] )
   .[ (         .[ " (

The space between the `.[' and `.]' requests and its argument will be
ignored; if you want a leading space, start with a doublequote which
will be then removed.

What do you think?  The old behaviour will of course be retained
within the compatibility mode.  I wonder whether I shall add a new
argument to groff which explicitly activates refer's compatibility
mode -- IMHO it's not worth the trouble.  I doubt that there are a lot
of documents which use this feature (overriding the used macro
package's formatting).


    Werner