Hi Ingo! At 2022-06-06T09:18:01+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > So since .B uses .itc, and that appears to match Heirloom behaviour > according to your research, it might be unwise to change that now.
I've changed it anyway. I now regard Heirloom's man(7) as buggy in this respect. If I run Heirloom nroff with V7's tmac.an, then the input .TH foo 1 .B bar\c baz results in a bold "bar" and a roman "baz". I've also confirmed Unix V7 troff (yes, troff) behavior thanks to John Gardner's cat2dit tool, which he helped me get working without having to screw with npm at all. See attachment. It will look weird; be warned that the C/A/T printed boustrophedonically. But it's enough to confirm that the font is selected three times; roman (mount position 1) to start with, then bold (3) after 'zab' (right-to-left "baz") is printed, then roman again after 'rab'. > Still, i wonder whether choosing that behaviour was a good decision. > From the user perspective, this feel asymmetric, in particular for > users who dislike traps and don't want to think about them: > > .BI command arg\c > text > > sets "text" in Roman font but > > .I arg\c > text > > sets "text" in italics? Isn't that really surprising from the > user perspective? No argument about .TP, but wouldn't it have > been better for .B and .I to use .it rather than .itc for symmetry > with .BI? I think you're right. > For now, i have added this entry to > https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/mandoc/TODO?rev=HEAD : > > - the man(7) single-font macros (e.g. .B) use .itc, > so ".B foo\c" followed by "bar" prints "bar" in bold > gbranden@ Sun, 5 Jun 2022 18:08:46 -0500 Hmm, yes, I don't think preserving Heirloom compatibility is beneficial here, since Heirloom has itself diverged from earlier AT&T troff. (All that said, I have never been offered any reason to believe that clean-room reimplementing a troff macro package is easy.) What ever will become of my reputation for never changing my mind? ;-) Regards, Branden
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