Re: [Groff] Critique this bold-italic private macro for man pages

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2017-05-03T20:13:29-0400, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On Wed, 3 May 2017 22:06:10 +0200 (CEST)
> Carsten Kunze <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > There are ways to detect the formatter but a manpage must not do
> > this.  
> 
> Why not?  ISTM we'd have better manpages if they weren't constrained
> to the rendering capability of a VT-100 terminal.

Oh, it can get much worse than that.  If we were to tell man page
writers  target only the common subset of features implemented by
everything that's claimed to be VT-100-compatible over the years, we
would be left only with that which devascii offers, and even that is
probably too sophisticated.

> For example, equations or pictures could augment the text, or replace
> some of it, when "printed".

Yes.  For the past several years, xterm has supported DEC's ReGIS[1] and
Sixel[2] graphics.

Note that when people call something "VT-100-compatible", they generally
mean some smorgasbord of features cribbed from the VT100 and its many
successor terminals (VT220, VT320, VT420, VT520, VT525), whatever seemed
cool and/or was easy to implement.

At the same time, the finer details of getting baseline VT100 emulation
completely correct with respect to, say, ACS ("alternate character set")
and cursor movement were frequently neglected.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmrmj5y72kg

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/W3m-wikipedia.png

Regards,
Branden

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