[Help-bash] bash man page and FreeBSD mandoc

[Derek Schrock]

Recently in the 12.0-RELEASE FreeBSD removed groff from the base system.

FreeBSD's man shell wrapper does some checks on the man page to see if
it's possible if mandoc can process the file.  bash's man page is
almost compliant with the exception of four control characters (0x7) at
the top of the file (lines 34 and 36).

        $ zcat bash.1.gz | mandoc -Tlint -Wunsupp
        mandoc: <stdin>:34:24: UNSUPP: unsupported control character: 0x7
        mandoc: <stdin>:34:31: UNSUPP: unsupported control character: 0x7
        mandoc: <stdin>:36:13: UNSUPP: unsupported control character: 0x7
        mandoc: <stdin>:36:30: UNSUPP: unsupported control character: 0x7

        $ man bash
        This manpage needs groff(1) to be rendered
        First install groff(1):
        pkg install groff

This appears to have been there since at least 1996 and for the life of
me couldn't find the exact reason for these characters.  It appears if
they're removed mandoc doesn't have any issues with them.  

Is it possible they can be removed or replaced?  The alt. for FreeBSD
users would be (as man suggests) install groff.