Hi Paul,
The first occurrence of a component is used,
e.g.\& .mh_profile's trumps $MHSHOW's.
...
is '\&' a hard space?
No, it's a non-printing, zero-width character. See 4.1 in Kernighan's
http://troff.org/54.pdf. troff rightly believes in a bigger space at
the end of a sentence than between words. :-) If troff sees the end of
a sentence at the end of an *input* line then it treats it as if two
spaces had been typed after it, i.e.
The C Programming Language. The Unix Programming
Environment.
and
The C Programming Language.
The Unix Programming Environment.
are equivalent. If the man page's source gets re-formated and `e.g.'
ends up at the end of a line then an overly large space will appear
after it. By writing it as `e.g.\&' I ensure the `.' will not appear at
the end of an input line in the future and good practice when the `.'
isn't the end of a sentence.
(for some reason i have it my head that the latin-isms ("i.e.",
"e.g.") should always be followed by a comma, but since i have no idea
where i learned that, and i don't think it was in school, it's
probably wrong.)
I understand it's usual to follow e.g. or i.e. with a comma in the USA.
It's a lot less common over here in England. :-)
Cheers, Ralph.
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