"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> writes:
> That's a good argument against grotty(1) emitting overstriking > sequences, at least by default, and yet that the people swiftest to > anger on this subject argue _for_ it. I'm not fully following this argument, but (assuming I've not completely lost the train of conversation), it may be relevant here that some years ago (it was in 2000, which surely was only five or six years ago) a contributor went to the trouble of writing Pod::Text::Overstrike to format POD output with backspacing with overstrike or underscores. At the time, a version that used termcap already existed (and still does). The stated reason was that the output was device-independent, unlike output that embeds formatting codes derived from device-specific termcap entries, and they really liked the bold and underlining rather than the plain text or *ad hoc* markup produced by Pod::Text. I know that to a first approximation all the world is now some variation of an imaginary VT100 terminal emulator, and thus one can usually blindly use SGR escape sequences and expect them to work in much the way that one can assume all programs only run on VMS. But I have occasionally had reports that Pod::Text::Overstrike is a better option for (some) Windows users because apparently their pager handled the overstriking but termcap (via the Perl Term::Cap module) wasn't available. I have no idea how dated this information is, having not used Windows myself in several decades, but I always found it interesting. I've kept the module working all these years since it's not much additional effort. -- Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
