[Groff] Re: grohtml vertical space patch and (screwdriver, nail and hammer fix)

[Gaius Mulley]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

> > yes, basically the groff_char source needs to be altered to use .ta
> > rather than horizontal motion escapes.
> 
> This isn't optimal.  I trust you if you say that horizontal motion
> escapes can't be handled properly in grohtml.  What I want instead is
> to add a special HTML position tag so that grohtml can do a good job.
> In case this can't be done with the current tags, we should invent a
> new one.

Hi Werner,

at present horizontal motion only moves a glyph within troff (no extra
tag is produced). We could introduce a new tag (variant on .col tag,
say .coln), which indicates that this position is has been generated
via a \h motion. post-grohtml could check for sequences of `.coln'
tags between `.sp' tags, record their positions and see whether they
line up vertically (or at least don't overlap with their successive
glyph). It could then replace `.coln' with `.col 1', `.col 2' as
appropriate and then let the current table handling code do the rest.

Gaius