[bug #56015] tty device should handle bullet character more intelligently

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #56015 (project groff):

[comment #4 comment #4:]
> I can't say I really understand the reasoning in the logic
> of the original or as modified.

Nor I.  But at least our understanding circa 2021 is recorded here for future
generations to look back on and shake their heads at.

Jeff's one misstatement aside (he calls the translation "unconditional" when
in fact it's wrapped in a !utf8 condition), I agree with his point that \[pc]
and \[md] are both poorer substitutions for \[bu] than an asterisk, or even a
lowercase o without the overstrike.  So I would remove \[pc] and \[md] from
consideration entirely, and use either a real bullet or some ASCII
replacement, probably *.

The proposed code snippets in comment #0 and comment #1 both rely on ".if c"
detecting characters' availability--which, as Branden notes in his
novella-length comment in bug #59962, doesn't seem to do what you'd want in
grotty.  A simple test seems to bear this out:


$ cat bullet_test
.if c\[bu] .tm Bullet exists.
$ groff -Tutf8 bullet_test
Bullet exists.
$ groff -Tascii bullet_test
Bullet exists.


So tty.tmac seemingly needs to make its decisions based on which "device"
(utf8, latin1, etc.) the user has asked for.

Given all the above, does the logic need to be anything more complicated than

.if !'\*[.T]'utf8' \
. tr \[bu]*

?  Bug #55799 aside, I don't know whether .tr or .char makes more sense for
this; I use .tr above not because I prefer it but just because it's what the
current code uses.

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