[bug #61386] [man] TH 'extra2' argument can overrun center footer

[G. Branden Robinson]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61386>

                 Summary: [man] TH 'extra2' argument can overrun center footer
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: gbranden
            Submitted on: Tue 26 Oct 2021 05:01:55 AM UTC
                Category: Macro - man
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Example rendering
                  Status: In Progress
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: gbranden
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

Man page titles are abbreviated in groff man(7) (see bug #43532), so in all
but the most pathological cases the default page header is unlikely to
overprint itself.

This is not true of footers.

On Michael Kerrisk's site man7.org, we can see examples of the TH 'extra2'
argument overrunning the date in the center footer, and groff's own man pages
exhibit this poor behavior.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/groff_char.7.html

We see:


groff 1.23.0.rc1.654-4e1db-dir1t9yAugust 2021                groff_char(7)


(Something I noticed only when copy-and-pasting this is that backspace
characters (ASCII 8) are embedded in it.  These appear to be produced by
grotty(1).  That's weird, but it seems to follow from character composition by
overstriking being permitted even on SGR-enabled devices.  In any case, in
testing my fix for this problem, backspaces do not occur in the output if the
left footer is successfully abbreviated.)

(This HTML version of the page was generated by postprocessing groff -Tutf8
output, as can bee seen by the page's own disclosure of the selected output
device.)

The instant problem is exacerbated by man7.org's use of a dirty Git checkout,
but even without that, our git-version strings have gotten pretty unwieldy--my
tree right now has:

groff 1.23.0.rc1.1449-84949

We should abbreviate such material in a similar manner as we do for certain
Erlang man page titles.




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