Re: [bug #53547] [PATCH] tmac/groff_ms.7.man: Change bold '[' and ']' to roman and other tidying

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 02:42:27AM -0400:

> Follow-up Comment #6, bug #53547 (project groff):
> 
> I did not find any need for this:
> 
> \# The next argument must be longer than the indent from .TP (8n)
> 
> or the spaces they refer to, nor for the transparent line indicators.

I don't have the slightest idea what Bjarni thought when
proposing this change:

@@ -276,7 +276,10 @@
 in the order shown.
 .
 .TP
-.B .RP [no]
+\#.B .RP [no]
+\!.B .RP \c
+\# The next argument must be longer than the indent from .TP (8n)
+.RB [ no ]\ \ \ \ \ \"
 Specifies the report format for your document.
 .
 The report format creates a separate cover page.

It looks totally bogus to me on more than one level.  You most
certainly do not want any of "\#", "\!", "\ \ \ " in a manual
page and you also most certainly do not want

  .B anything \c
  .RB anything

> Things seem to be rendering fine both to the utf8 and PDF output
> devices.  (The underlying changes involving the font style used
> for option brackets and similar, are legitimate.)
> 
> Is mandoc doing something differently?

The rendering of

  .TP
  .BR ".RP " [ no ]
  Specifies the report format for your document.

in the context of groff_ms(7) is identical in groff and mandoc.
(Otherwise, it would be a bug in mandoc.  :)


Only the SYNOPSIS differs; groff renders:

       groff -ms [option ...] [input-file ...]

       groff -m ms [option ...] [input-file ...]

Mandoc renders:

       [option ...] [input-file ...] [option ...] [input-file ...]

because it does not implement the .SY macro.  That macro is exceedingly
rare in practice.  I scanned all ten thousand third-party software
packages in the OpenBSD ports tree and could not find a single use
outside groff itself.

I think the macro should be deleted, first from the few groff manual
pages using it, then from man-ext.tmac.  It is a half-hearted attempt
at sneaking semantic markup into a purely presentational language
that (forunately) never got traction anywhere.

Yours,
  Ingo