M. Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote on Sun, 23 Nov 2003
at 09:52:58 -0700 in <20031123.095258.98345291.imp@bsdimp.com>:


> : IIRC, "new sentence, new line" has always been a requirement for *roff 
> : to process text correctly.
> 
> That's what I was told when I asked why FreeBSD enforced such a rule.
> Maybe things have changed in roff-land since then...

[nt]roff would be a pretty laughable document preparation system if
you had to have a newline after every sentence. Can you honestly
imagine writing a paper or report that way?

It ("new sentence, new line") feels like a sick joke writing text for
manpages.

I fear a "rule" like this discourages people from writing text with
any verbosity. That's part of why I dislike it so strongly.

(It also makes discourages me from filling my paragraphs, or even
thinking in paragraphs.)

I think the only grounding you'll find in the roff manual about this
is section 4 (Text Fillin, Adjusting, and Centering), subection 4.1
("Filling and adjusting"), 2nd paragraph:

| 	An input line ending with ., ?, or ! is taken to be the end of
| a sentence, and an additional space character is automatically
| provided during filling. Multiple inter-word space characters found
| in the input are retained, except for trailing spaces; initial
| spaces also cause a break.

--jhawk