[bug #57510] not all TTY output controls simultaneously available

[Dave]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57510>

                 Summary: not all TTY output controls simultaneously available
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: barx
            Submitted on: Tue 31 Dec 2019 09:32:35 AM CST
                Category: Device - others
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Incorrect behaviour
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

For TTY output, there is no way to fully take advantage of local conditions.

In particular, the two following things cannot both be done:
1) Use information about the user's current locale
2) Use italic rendering, if available

To do (1), a user can invoke the nroff script, which contains logic to detect
the user's environment (examining, for instance, the output of "locale
charmap" and some $LC_* environment variables) and customize output
appropriately.  To do (2), a user can invoke groff with an appropriate -T
value and the -P-i option, which passes -i to the grotty postprocessor.

nroff lacks an equivalent to -P, rendering it unable to pass arbitrary options
to grotty.  grotty flags such as -f, -i and -r give the user control over
aspects of TTY output; these are unavailable to nroff, the tool specifically
designed to generate TTY output.

This is perhaps technically a feature request rather than a bug report, but
TTY output is so fundamental to the purpose of nroff that having TTY options
unavailable to it seems like a basic enough design flaw to count as a bug, so
I've filed it as such.




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