[Groff] Should Greek letters be slanted?

[Robert D. Goulding]

I thought that Greek letters should come out slanted in groff ps output -
and it seems that they *should* be slanted.  devps/DESC lists SS before S;
and SS contains definitions of *only* lowercase greek characters.  So,
when groff hits a character like \(*a, having been unable to find it in
the standard text fonts, it should next look at SS and find it there -
right?

But,

.PP
\(*a\(*b\(*g\(*d

gives upright characters.  (BTW, I tried removing the definitions of these
characters from S and it didn't help; and this happens for me with both
1.17.2 and 1.18).  It occurred to me that it could be a ghostscript
problem - I recently upgraded to gnu gs 7.05.  Can someone try this out
and see if they can replicate it - or tell me that I've got it all
completely wrong?

Robert.
(Sorry for the barrage of posts)