Re: Man page customization after 1.23?

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth Nate Bargmann:
> seems to work as expected, at least on my Arch.  However, I don't see
> that OSC 8 links work in evince.  Hmmm.

OSC is a kind of control sequence, OSC 8 is the way with which we 
get links to a terminal.   Links in PDFs are interesting, but the 
correct term is not “OSC 8.”

> Are there plans to give users access to coloring the various text styles
> when grotty is set to generate SGR output?  Right now only the -i option
> is available.  The reason I ask is that even though italics catch my eye
> in a PDF or on the printed page, they seem to slip by when mixed with
> normal text in a terminal.  Perhaps that is mostly because I've gotten
> used to man pages on the display having such emphasized text in color or
> my preferred Gnome Terminal doesn't stylize the characters enough.  More
> than likely it's a matter of training.

First:  What you’re trying to do is a hack.   However you 
accomplish it, it’ll be a hack.   The manual author said “This is 
italic.”   It’s unlikely you colorize the italic text in a book 
you bought.   A hack, and nothing but.

Now, ways to get the colors:  You could modify an.tmac and 
doc.tmac, as well as the font description files.   I’m not sure 
what features for colors groff has; maybe it allows you to define 
a font “I” with a certain color, maybe not.¹   You can change the 
definitions of .I, .IR, .RI & Co., though.

You could modify grotty to give you colors.   Right now, it just 
spits out SGI control sequences.   You could change that.

I’m playing with grotty and terminfo.   My first conclusion is 
that terminfo isn’t great.   I might finish in a few weeks.   If 
grotty uses terminfo sometime, you could change the terminal 
description.   Something like

        xterm-man|xterm with nice italics replaced by green,
                sitm=\E[32m,
                ritm=\E[39m,
                use=xterm,

would allow you to have MANROFFOPT=-P-Txterm-man give you green 
non-italic italics.   What a giant hack.   “This text is italic.”   
“Sure, how do I make text italic?”   “To make the text italic, do 
what makes it green.”   “Here you have your italic text!”

The least hacky way might be to let your terminal emulator do the 
job:  You configure it so that it renders italic text as colorful.   
Still a hack.

¹ If \fI didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a big deal, though:  It’s 
a hack anyway.

> As noted above, italicized text on the console is colored green on black
> which I presume is a choice of grotty, but perhaps it is a function of
> the console hardware driver.

That’s a function of the Linux terminal.