[bug #61561] [grotty] 'sgr' device control command takes effect only at page breaks

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #61561 (project groff):

> Not sure about you, but I see a perfect opportunity to put a
currently-useless bit of kruft to good use by repurposing it to toggle
“real” italics, Fraktur, dimmed text, strikeouts, and any other
spiffy-looking but fundamentally useless effect for terminals that happen to
support such nicer-looking effects:
[...]
> I might be leaning too strongly on my expectations as a part-time Emacs
user, whose graphical mode brings out these pleasant-looking effects in text
I'm normally used to reading in very spartan settings.

Yes...on the mailing list named an idea I've hinted at before (in doc/ms.ms):
having grotty use available system resources to determine these matters
instead of installing its own bespoke configuration system.

The terminfo library.

I can understand why this road wasn't taken 20 years ago: ncurses had only
been under Thomas Dickey's official maintenance for a couple of years after
mercurial stewardship by others and an erratic release history, there were
still a lot of S-Lang partisans touting its superiority on scant evidence, and
people were still clinging to termcap as somehow preferable on any basis to
terminfo.

But we're in a better world now.

What I don't know is exactly how we want to preserve the ability to ignore
certain terminal capabilities.  I expect people to be surprised if underlines
in nroff documents suddenly turn into real italics.  Some will be _pleasantly_
surprised, but not all.

I need to learn how capability cancellation would be achieved at runtime.  I
have the atom of knowledge that in a terminfo description, you suffix a
capability name with '@' to cancel it, but not much more.  There is the
question of what we tell our users.  More command-line options and environment
variables, or tell them to override terminfo?  The latter would be a surprise
too.  Even if it turns out to be the architecturally correct solution (which I
suspect), we would need a period of transition as a considerable number of our
users discover that terminal capabilities are even a thing that exists in Unix
systems (look at all the fancy programs and scripts that blast ECMA-48 color
attribute escape sequences completely unconditionally, without checking
anything or caring what's going to have to process them).

Having seem npm run, I have a pretty good guess who some of those people
are...

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