(ti)troff question - horizontal motion and drawing arguments

[guy at sun.UUCP]

> Are you sure that your problem wasn't due to the fact that
> 
>         \h'8*\w' 'u'
> means   \h'8m*\w' 'u'   because the default unit for \h is ems?

Having played with that problem a bit, I'm almost certain that was the
problem.

> BTW, pic knows that strings like "doesn't" can't be delimited by
> quote, so it switches to \(ts (yes, you can use special
> characters as delimiters). If you really want it to die badly,
> use a string such as "it's \(ts, the sigma variant!"....

Not only that, but you can use control characters as delimiters; I think
"mm" (and maybe some other macro packages) use ^G (control-G, ASCII BEL,
'\007') as a delimiter.  Why they chose \(ts, I dunno, unless they were
afraid that some macro package had usurped ^G, in which chase whey they
didn't choose ^A or some other control character, I dunno....
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)