Follow-up Comment #2, bug #68543 (group groff): Hi Deri,
At 2026-07-21T11:24:27-0400, Deri James wrote:
> Follow-up Comment #1, bug #68543 (group groff):
>
> This is probably pertinent to a discussion of font styles in man
> pages, as it pertains to troff output.
>
> Currently we can control which fonts are used for:-
>
> Body text (-f)
Yes, as a family.
> Headings (-dHF)
Yes, as any font identifier.
> "Topics" (-dTF)
Eh? What's that? Not in GNU groff.
Oh, I think you mean `MF`. Let your inner Samuel L. Jackson flow!
-dMF=man‐page‐topic‐font
Select the font used for man page identifiers in TH calls
and topics named in MR calls; the default is “I” (italic
style of the default family). Any valid argument to
groff’s “ft” request may be used. If the MF string ends
in “I”, the package assumes it to be an oblique typeface,
and applies italic corrections before and after man page
topics and identifiers.
> But we have no control of the font used in EX/EE sections, it is hard
> coded. It would be nice if people agree this gap should be filled.
I tend to add registers and strings for stylesheet-like configuration
man pages only when there are arguments (as with the cold war over the
face to be used for the "topic" in man page cross references) or people
are raking me over the coals for changing defaults. Granted, pointing
out that a rendering parameter is now configurable doesn't completely
mollify them when they also dislike _that_ the default changed. A very
recent example is Russ Allbery (podlators/ od2man maintainer) getting
cross with me over a change I made that he didn't notice, but some of
his users did.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1134776
I hadn't known at the time I made that change that pod2man "abused" the
`IP` macro with such...single-minded dedication! Fortunately we seem to
have worked things out, and POD will be in good shape to benefit from
automatic tagging if I ever get that implemented. And the door is open
for it to exercise the `LS`/`LE` enhancement, arriving in groff 1.25.0.
Anyway, that's a _counter_-example of the point you raise because I
haven't run into anyone who _wants_ to use a different font family for
example regions--and it would have to be a _family_ because style
changes are foreseeable and expected occasionally in `EX`/`EE` regions.
Can you show me where you've seen some demand for setting man pages
example regions in, say Helvetica or Bookman?
In bug #68497, Hubert Garavel brought to my attention a truly old-school
means of setting "example regions", circa 1990.
.SS SYNTAX DEFINITION
.P
The textual syntax of BES files is described by the following context-free
grammar, where \f4<empty>\fP denotes the empty sequence of symbols and
\f4<nat>\fP denotes a non-negative integer:
.nf
.cs 4 23
\f4<axiom> ::= <block-list>
.sp
<block-list> ::= <block>
| <block> <block-list>
.sp
<block> ::= block <sign> <block-idf> <unique> <mode> is
<equation-list>
end block
.sp
<sign> ::= mu
| nu
.sp
<block-idf> ::= B<nat>
.sp
<unique> ::= <empty>
| unique
... and so on.
_______________________________________________________
Reply to this item at:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68543>
_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
