On Thu, Feb 24, 2022 at 12:02:55AM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote: >On Feb 27 2021, Reuti wrote: > >> I'm not a `groff` expert, but the sequence "\,some-text\/" appears a couple >> of times. What effect does it have for the formatting as the "," and "/" are >> not output? > >\, and \/ add some space as italic correction, see (groff) Ligatures and >Kerning.
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Ligatures-and-Kerning.html Note that these escapes are a no-op when manual pages are formatted for a terminal (e.g. running "man tail" and viewing the output in a pager). They are added to improve output rendered for printing (ps, pdf, dvi, etc): man -t tail | lpr -Pps man -Tpdf tail >tail.1.pdf As Paul noted, those escapes and other formatting are added by help2man, using a heuristic which mostly works, but seems a bit hit and miss with some of the tail flags: "--bytes=[+]NUM" as you identified doesn't fare well. Compare to ls flags "--block-size=SIZE" and "--color[=WHEN]". I'll take a look to see if I can do something to handle tail's output better. --bod
