mullen@NRL-CSS.ARPA (09/19/84)
From: Preston Mullen <mullen@NRL-CSS.ARPA>
As you noted, .li appears in the index of the old TROFF manual. I think
I learned about it from someone who had used an earlier version of TROFF
when it was properly documented.
I assume that .li is mnemonic for "literal". With regular TROFF,
.li N
causes the next N lines (default 1) to be read literally, in a sense.
I recently examined the code to see what this really means. It looks
like all it does is to:
1. treat requests as ordinary text, e.g.
.sp 4
prints as
.sp 4
instead of as four blank lines, and
2. ignore transparent mode, so that text preceded by \! is processed
as if the \! were not there.
The Typesetter-Independent TROFF now being delivered has no .li request.
I can get the desired effect using .cc and .c2, but then I have to pick
a suitable argument for these requests that won't appear in the input.
Using ".li" was easier and, I think, safer.
I don't really see why it had to be removed; the change broke some of
my TROFF macros. Could this have been part of making transparent mode
work properly?