Re: [Groff] surprise, surprise

[Clarke Echols]

I know extremely little about troff internals, but I used troff for close
to 15 years while at Hewlett-Packard (including using it to create
artwork for PC boards "just because it was the most practical tool I
had available at the time").  I was responsible for the HP-UX Reference
(man pages) for HP-UX 5.0, 6.*, 7.*, 8.*, and 9.0 which were all coded
in troff and produced using eroff with PostScript output.  I also used
a modified set of man macros which I had altered to meet our publication
needs. [I am now retired]

As far as I am concerned, the only time that troff/groff/*roff should
ever interpret a "'" or "." as a control/command character is when it
appears as the FIRST character in a line of input.  If it is preceded
by \fB or anything else, it should always be treated as ordinary text.
The only exception would be when the only preceding characters are
whitespace, which troff interprets as a break, equivalent to ".br".
I don't understand the rationale for the special treatment of whitespace,
and I never used it for that purpose.  Anything that departs from the
aforementioned behavior I would consider to be a software defect.

Clarke

"(Ted Harding)" wrote:
> 
> On 26-Aug-01 Andrew Koenig wrote:
> >> Consider the following example:
> >
> >>   .de test
> >>   Hallo!
> >>   ..
> >>   \fB.test\fP
> >
> >> Surprisingly, this yields
> >
> >>   Hallo!
> >
> >> Even more surprising is the fact that it isn't bold...
> >
> >> Is this documented?  How does UNIX troff behave?
> >
> > Unix troff produces no output for this example.
> >
> > The relevant behavior is documented in the very first paragraph of
> > the troff manual, which says:

<snip rest>