[Groff] Re: new grotty format

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > Well, if the SGR escapes are on by default, I'd think you do need to
> > consider the effects that will have on popular terminals.  AFAIK,
> > even the majority of xterm versions don't support colors, outside
> > the GNU/Linux world.
> 
> The eternal question whether we shall follow a standard or not...
> ISO 6429 is from 1991 -- isn't eleven years enough to wait?

Most terminals indeed support SGR for bold an underline these days.  But
I was talking about programs which read Groff's output and do something 
with it: those programs expect the traditional `man' \b type of bold and 
underline, not the SGR escapes.  I don't think there was any significant 
movement towards SGR in that area.

> > Didn't you say that you also use SGR for bold and underline?  That
> > would produce similar problems for terminals whose bold and
> > underline commands are not SGR, right?
> 
> Do you think there are terminals which have SGR sequences for
> activating colors and non-SGR sequences for activating bold and
> underline?

My point is that colors in man pages is a rare phenomenon, but bold and 
underline are not.  So, while it might not be a big problem if color SGR 
sequences aren't supported, bold and underline _must_ be supported, or 
users will see gibberish in every man page.

> My idea is to add an environment variable, say, GROFF_NO_SGR.  If set,
> the old scheme is used.  This makes it possible that the old behaviour
> can be forced without any changes to existing programs while the new
> behaviour becomes the default.
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?

Yes, I think so.