Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Russ Allbery]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

> That's a good argument against grotty(1) emitting overstriking
> sequences, at least by default, and yet that the people swiftest to
> anger on this subject argue _for_ it.

I'm not fully following this argument, but (assuming I've not completely
lost the train of conversation), it may be relevant here that some years
ago (it was in 2000, which surely was only five or six years ago) a
contributor went to the trouble of writing Pod::Text::Overstrike to format
POD output with backspacing with overstrike or underscores.  At the time,
a version that used termcap already existed (and still does).

The stated reason was that the output was device-independent, unlike
output that embeds formatting codes derived from device-specific termcap
entries, and they really liked the bold and underlining rather than the
plain text or *ad hoc* markup produced by Pod::Text.

I know that to a first approximation all the world is now some variation
of an imaginary VT100 terminal emulator, and thus one can usually blindly
use SGR escape sequences and expect them to work in much the way that one
can assume all programs only run on VMS.  But I have occasionally had
reports that Pod::Text::Overstrike is a better option for (some) Windows
users because apparently their pager handled the overstriking but termcap
(via the Perl Term::Cap module) wasn't available.

I have no idea how dated this information is, having not used Windows
myself in several decades, but I always found it interesting.  I've kept
the module working all these years since it's not much additional effort.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>