Re: [Groff] Re: new grotty format

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Rick Richardson wrote:

> OTOH, at least some of those programs which read Groff's output don't
> handle the defacto overstrike conventions, either.  For example,
> "enscript" recognizes underline but not bold. "a2ps" recognizes bold
> but not underline.

There should be no problem to add such support to enscript and a2ps, if 
that is needed.  Both programs are Free Software.

> Here is a chance, at the cost of a bit of forced transitional pain, to
> make it easier for those kinds of programs to recognize underline,
> bold, and color with a single state machine.

So you are saying that, because enscript doesn't support the traditional 
troff way of underlining and bold, users of those programs which do 
support it need to suffer ``transitional pain''?  That's an interesting 
approach, I must say...

Note that I'm not against introduction of this feature.  I'm merely 
saying that an incompatible behavior should not be introduced as the 
default, before users and programs have been given chance to adapt.