Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Russ Allbery]

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

> It sounds like the way is clear to change perldoc's default back to
> Pod::Man plus nroff.  ;-)

See https://github.com/briandfoy/pod-perldoc/pull/36.  It looks like it's
being worked on, but there's apparently some complexity downstream of both
of us in figuring out a good pager to use.

> Thomas Dickey has a huge section in the ncurses FAQ about this.

> https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html

> Scroll down to:
>       Why not make “xterm” equated to "xterm-256color"?

This reminded me that it had been a while since I'd looked around Thomas
Dickey's web site, and I spent a very enjoyable day reacquainting myself
with his writing style.  :)

> My copy may be even more out of date than yours, but let's see if we can
> get at least this claim fixed.

>        Support for code 3 (italic) is rare and therefore not mentioned
>        in that table.  It is not believed to be fully supported by any
>        of the terminals listed, although it’s displayed as green in the
>        Linux console, but it is reportedly supported by urxvt.

> grotty(1):
>        -i     Render oblique‐styled fonts (I and BI) with the SGR
>               attribute for italic text rather than underlined text.
>               Many terminals don’t support this attribute; however,
>               xterm(1), since patch #314 (2014‐12‐28), does.  Ignored if
>               -c is also specified.

Ah, thank you.  Confirmed.  I suspect at some point in the past I forgot
that I have to configure xterm to use a TrueType font in order to get a
lot of the font behavior.  (I use a bitmap font because it's substantially
more readable for long periods of time than any TrueType font I've found
at equivalent sizes, but using a bitmap font disables some of xterm's font
family support.)

Also, some of the other parameters that weren't supported the last time I
checked seem to be supported now by at least xterm, namely "crossed-out"
or strikethrough and double-underline.  I need to add those to the module.

I've made some updates, but I am very overdue for another round of work on
that module.

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