G. Branden Robinson to Anton Shepelev: > > This means that one must /set/ rather than unset > > GROFF_SGR to restore the normal nroff behavior. > > This advice, while still applicable to groff 1.22.4, is > becoming stale. Distributors that introduced the > GROFF_SGR Debianism have now started to withdraw it when > packaging groff 1.23.0.
I like coming up with solutions to semi-stale problems. > I managed to remain ignorant of "GROFF_SGR" for something > like 20 years because (1) for much of that time, as the > Debian bug report notes, it was undocumented; and (2) > unlike a startling number of people, I lacked a prurient > desire to decorate man page renderings with all the colors > of the ANSI X3.64 rainbow, I thought it rather the guilty pleasure of clueless and tasteless composers of HTML e-mail. > and certainly not via the exercise of less(1) features > that were _also_, at the time, undocumented!) I was exposed to it when I decided to write a man page that looked right on screen, in plain text, and on paper; and direct `nroff' output to the console did not look like the output of the `man' command, which nowadays seems sometimes to rely on some man-specific formtter rather than a bona fide `nroff'.
