Re: new grotty format

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 09:40:39 +0100 (CET)
> 
> I've changed the output format of grotty, the TTY frontend of groff,
> starting with the next version of groff (to appear in a few weeks I
> hope).  To support colours properly, and to remove the ugly backspace
> hack for underlining and boldification, the new default format uses
> SGR escape sequences.  This doesn't work with info yet.  Please
> update.

Thanks for the heads-up.

This change in Groff raises an interesting issue: what should Info do
with these escape sequences.  Is it okay to check whether the
terminal supports colors, and if so, let the escape sequences get
through unaltered, and otherwise strip them away (with the exception
of bold and underline escapes)?

Also, I'm unsure what would a typical `man' and a typical pager do with
those escapes, especially if the terminal doesn't support colors?
What does, for example, GNU Less do?

Finally, what about terminals whose color commands are not the SGR
escape sequences?  Or do all Unix terminals support SGR?  (I'm asking
because I clearly see in the termcap/terminfo data base many
terminals whose color commands are different from what the example
you sent shows.)

> It seems that the use of the `man' program in info is neither
> configurable nor documented.  There is not a single word in
> info.texinfo, and no command line options can influence its behaviour.

Strange, I was pretty much sure it was documented, but perhaps I was
dreaming.

> At least the `-p' option to select/unselect preprocessors should be
> handled.

??? I don't understand--AFAIK, most `man' versions don't have a -p
option, as the formatter they invoke should DTRT automatically.
Isn't that so?

> Finally, there seems to be a bug in man.c (of texinfo 4.0f).  In
> line 315 there is
> 
>   sprintf (cmdline, "%s %s %s", formatter_args[0], manpage_pagename,  
>                                 arg_index > 2 ? manpage_section : "");
> 
> I think this should be
> 
>   sprintf (cmdline, "%s %s %s", formatter_args[0],
>                                 arg_index > 2 ? manpage_section : "",
>                                 manpage_pagename);

Oops, you are right, thanks.  The reason this was not reported before
is that this line is in the no-fork branch, so only the DJGPP
(a.k.a. MS-DOS) port uses it.