Hi Jason,

Jason McIntyre wrote on Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 02:54:20PM +0000:

> i have reverted it, with a heavy heart.

Do you think i should try and convince the groff folks to always
render .Aq/.Ao/.Ac as ASCII '<' and '>', even in UTF-8, HTML, PDF
output and the like?

Benefits:

 + easier rules for authors, smaller risk of mistakes,
   and ".Aq Mt" would no longer be an exception
 + allows nicer and simpler mdoc(7) source code
   for configuration file documentation like smtpd.conf and pf.conf
   and nicer markup in pages documenting HTML code
 + in programming documentation (as opposed to, say, quantum physics
   calculations) angle brackets are exceedingly rare,
   making .Aq mostly useless under the current rules

Downside:

 - In cases where authors really want angle brackets - e.g., does
   a free software package to help with quantum mechanics calculations
   exist? - the output will look slightly worse, but not much worse,
   and given the rarity, i think that would be acceptable.  Besides,
   people who want real angle brackets in some unusual situation
   can still use .Eo \(la foobar Ec \(ra .

Yours,
  Ingo

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