Thanks to all who have answered my questions. I was unclear w.r.t. the backspace character: It isn't needed for positioning (this is done internally in grotty before the output is emitted) but for signalling that a character should be underlined or rendered bold.[1] This isn't directly supported on the console but by pagers like `less'.
groff never uses termcap or terminfo information for its TTY output, and I don't plan to add this -- nobody has ever complained. Looking into the source of jless, the Japanized version of less (which apparently doesn't support Unicode), it seems that indeed two `\b's are expected for overstriking and bold printing. Bruno has also shown that two backspace characters give predictable results, so this is what I will use. Werner [1] This is the old scheme. The new scheme uses SGR escape sequences. _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff