On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 7:07 PM Russ Allbery <ea...@eyrie.org> wrote:
> > 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. Overstrikes are more easily filtered and transformed for other output formats than levels of nested escape codes that are terminal specific. Enscript from Adobe, and the more featureful GNU replacement, are good examples of tools designed to work with nroff or other daisywheel/line printer output using overstrikes. The preformatted line and page layout are fully retained with all overstrikes rendered properly and the ability to use any font (converted) in the postscript output, which is awesome for printing historical documents designed for nroff. You can also easily pass custom roff overstrikes to simulate combined typewriter characters beyond bold and underline. I have no major objection to using escape sequences and agree they open some additional possibilities for functionality in modern terminal emulators. However, I think that most people using overstrikes have less as the pager in raw mode where underlines and bold display correctly for manual pages. It's a shame that early pc vga consoles did not display underlines or italics properly! Most other *nix platforms did, and that's really not a problem in X or modern graphical consoles like wscons on NetBSD that display overstrikes correclty. Best, Dan -- Dan Plassche
