Follow-up Comment #38, bug #63074 (group groff): The objective as stated in comment #9 and as summarized, "support expression of arbitrary byte sequences in device control commands", I'm pronouncing accomplished. The "arbitrary byte sequences" we wanted to support were to accommodate the encoding of characters that need to appear in device extension commands but are not expressible in ASCII, the encoding used by "grout", the page description language output by GNU _troff_.
One could envision three levels of support for encoding arbitrary characters.
1. By Unicode code point. Reusing _groff_'s own syntax for Unicode special
character escape sequences was irresistibly tempting, so that's what I
implemented. We have that in Git HEAD.
2. By (simple) _groff_ special character escape sequence, like \['o'] (in
"Cicerón"). We have that in Git HEAD too.
3. By composite special character escape sequence, like "\[o aa]", which we
might also use to write "Cicerón"--"Cicer\[o aa]n". We don't have that. It
proved to be difficult. (The formatter warns if it encounters this syntax
where it can't handle it.)
Enough has been done that Deri is happy with the feature, and characterized
level #3 above as a goal I set for myself, not a response to user demand. And
that's true.
I reckon it's better to move on toward a _groff_ 1.24 release than try to
satisfy my own goals involving perfectly composable orthogonal features.
The changes to the `\X` escape sequence are already documented in groff(7),
groff_diff(7), and our Texinfo manual. All that really remains is to write a
NEWS item for this.
The `output` request and `\!` escape sequence remain for those who wish to
bypass this mechanism.
I'll file a new ticket for "level #3". Maybe I can sort it out for _groff_
1.25. Who knows?
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