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[bug #63777] explicitly document transition onto first page


From: Dave
Subject: [bug #63777] explicitly document transition onto first page
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2023 14:36:55 -0500 (EST)

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #63777 (project groff):

Thanks for the expanded break explanation!

It's a little hard for me to judge--now that I know how it works--how well it
explains the situation to someone who doesn't know how it works.  But I wonder
if there could still be some improvement here.

For those savannah lurkers who want to follow the discussion but are also too
lazy to look at commit ac4e28bd
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=ac4e28bd>, the new
wording is: "A break updates the drawing position per the page offset,
indentation, vertical spacing, and page length, interrupting filling."  (As
before, from here it talks only about how to cause breaks.)

First, the current wording could be construed to mean a break _always_ updates
the drawing position, but in fact it _conditionally_ updates it, only if the
drawing position is somewhere other than where the next left margin would be. 
(That is, multiple breaks in a row have the same effect as a single break;
only one of them updates the drawing position.)

Then, once you start saying something like "updates the drawing position if
necessary," the crux of comment #2 again arises: is a position update
"necessary" when no output is pending and we're in the no-man's land
(no-person's land?) before the first page?

CSTR #54 treated this thing we're not calling a "pseudo-page transition" as a
special case whose breaking behavior needed to be explicitly mentioned.  I
sympathize with the desire to keep wording general whenever possible--and
maybe that _is_ possible here with some wording I haven't conceived of.  But
the novice roff user who grasps the basics--including that a break is a thing
that normally has an effect only when it needs to--might well be tempted to
think that the situation of being "above" the first page and having nothing
queued is a case where a break need cause no movement.


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