* Stop disabling adjustment and automatic hyphenation before tables,
and incorrectly "restoring" it afterward. In addition to repetitious
boilerplate around tables, the `ad` and `hy` requests, when not given
arguments, do not behave as many man page authors expect. If
adjustment was initially disabled when rendering the page, it was
being activated after `TE` calls, frustrating the desire of the
reader. Furthermore, `hy` when given no argument enables automatic
hyphenation in mode "1", which is not an appropriate value for the
TeX-based hyphenation patterns for English that groff has used for
over 30 years. And analogously to `ad`, a simple `hy` request would
reactivate automatic hyphenation even if the reader had disabled it.
Moreover, such fiddling is often unnecessary. tbl(1) from groff
1.23.0 describes how tbl(1) has always worked, dating back to Michael
Lesk's original implementation at Bell Labs in the 1970s.
"Ordinarily, a table entry is typeset rigidly. It is not filled,
broken, hyphenated, adjusted, or populated with additional inter-
sentence space. ... Text blocks are formatted as was the text prior
to the table, modified by applicable column descriptors. ... Add na
or ad requests to the beginning of a text block to alter its
adjustment distinctly from other text in the document. As with other
table entries, when a text block ends, any alterations to formatting
parameters are discarded. They do not affect subsequent table
entries, not even other text blocks."
* Apropos of the foregoing, add `na` and `nh` requests to the
"Interface" columns of MT-safety tables in pages' "ATTRIBUTES"
sections, so that C function names are not inappropriately hyphenated.
I produced this change with the following GNU sed script.
:start
/^\.ad l/{N;/\n\.nh/{N;/\n\.TS/s/.*/.TS/}}
/^\.TE/{N;/\n\.hy/{N;/\n\.ad/s/.*/.TE/}}
/^Interface.*Attribute.*Value/{N;/\nT{/s/.*/&\n.na\n.nh/
:loop
n
/T{/s/.*/&\n.na\n.nh/
/^\.TE/b start;
b loop
}