At 2020-12-01T21:12:47+0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> >>>> +vs.
> >>>
> >>> Please, s/vs./vs/
> >>> See the reasons below:
> >>>
> >>> Michael (mtk),
> >>>
> >>> Here the renderer outputs a double space
> >>> (as for separating two sentences).
> >>>
> >>> Are you okay with that?
> 
> Yes, that should probably be avoided. I'm not sure what the
> correct way is to prevent that in groff though. I mean, one
> could write
> 
> .RI "vs.\ " unencoded_len
> 
> but I think that simply creates a nonbreaking space,
> which is not exactly what is desired.

Use the non-printing input break escape sequence, "\&", to suppress
end-of-sentence detection.  This is not a groffism, it goes back to
1970s nroff and troff.

I'm attaching a couple of pages from some introductory material I wrote
for the groff Texinfo manual in the forthcoming 1.23.0.

Regards,
Branden