At 2017-11-02T04:55:25-0400, Thomas Dickey wrote: > thanks - someone reported a problem with the same macro in ncurses. > (I'll have to make a script to check for other instances, since I've > used bullets in a lot of places - I've a to-do item for that anyway).
Yeah, I've noticed those. When I read over the ncurses man pages I get all kinds of ideas... ;-) > For the rest, I'll pick through in case there's something I find > that's an unnecessary groffism (but likely will just apply most/all of the > change). I tried not to introduce any; I know you're concerned with broad portability, especially to legacy systems. > > Make them test instead simply for "n" (nroff mode, as opposed to > > troff mode), since that appears to be the intention. > > > > 02. Use the \(ha, \(ga, and \(ti character escapes instead of ^`~ > > literals, since these produce full-sized spacing glyphs instead of > > small ones intended as combining characters on troff output devices. > > > > 03. Use \- character escape in (especially in examples) when an ASCII > > "hyphen-minus" is intended; ensures that the correct glyph can be > > cut and pasted from the man page both from TTY and PDF output > > devices. > > :-) > > It would have been nice if groff hadn't reversed common usage here. I didn't realize that was the case. My battered old copy of _Unix Text Processing_ (Dougherty, O'Reilly) doesn't really cover these matters. (Its explanation of \- is simply "the minus sign in the _current_ font", emphasis in original.) There simply isn't much discussion of spacing vs. combining glyphs. Also, I noted that your definition of NS and NE complains about groff not offering DS and DE (display start and end). As far as my limited awareness goes, displays were never part of anyone's man macros; they were part of both ms and mm, though. GNU roff's man has EX and EE, but notes that not all legacy systems' man macros had them. However, the GNU folks seemed to believe they did not originate these macros themselves. Let me know if I can be of any help. -- Regards, Branden
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