[groff] 05/09: gperl(1): Get rid of page-local bullet string.

[G. Branden Robinson]

gbranden pushed a commit to branch master
in repository groff.

commit 56aa34189b265bd2ff1b3d9fa3886cfec98b20e2
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Sun Aug 16 00:27:23 2020 +1000

    gperl(1): Get rid of page-local bullet string.
    
    This is one of the more superfluous non-portabilities I've seen in the
    groff man page corpus.  There's no need to define a string for a
    typographical bullet.  The bullet special character escape \(bu is
    documented in CSTR #54.  Possibly Bernd didn't like what was substituted
    for it on some nroff devices, but -Tutf8 _does_ have a proper bullet
    character (depending on your terminal's font), and if a user of a less
    capable terminal doesn't like the fallbacks in tty.tmac (I'm not crazy
    about the simple use of "o" with -Tascii on glass TTYs myself), they can
    do this in their man.local:
    
        .if '\*[.T]'ascii' .char \[bu] *
    
    ...which achieves what Bernd was doing, but for all man pages.
    
    Testing did reveal something interesting, though...
    
    I had to go ahead and delete the "2m" indentation argument to .IP as
    well.  Without it, the body of the paragraph got pushed to the next
    output line, as if the tag were too wide.  Obviously neither a "*" nor
    a bullet is wider than 2 ems.  Experimentation reveals that an indent of
    "2n" leads to a break, but "3n" does not[1].  It seems there is an
    off-by-one error either in our documentation of .IP and .TP, or in the
    implementation.  If this was the real reason for the string definition,
    it was undocumented and obscure.  My Gordian solution was to dispose of
    the indent argument to .IP calls as well.
    
    [1] 1m - 1n = 0 on nroff devices.
---
 contrib/gperl/gperl.1.man | 13 ++++---------
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

diff --git a/contrib/gperl/gperl.1.man b/contrib/gperl/gperl.1.man
index 03a09fb..911b650 100644
--- a/contrib/gperl/gperl.1.man
+++ b/contrib/gperl/gperl.1.man
@@ -33,11 +33,6 @@ gperl \- groff preprocessor for Perl parts in roff files
 .el .ds EL \&.\|.\|.\&\"
 .\" called with \*(EL
 .
-.\" Bullet
-.ie t .ds BU \(bu
-.el .ds BU *
-.\" used in '.IP \*(BU 2m' (former .Topic)
-.
 .
 .\" ====================================================================
 .SH Synopsis
@@ -157,9 +152,9 @@ can either be without arguments, or by a request that has 
the term
 .B start
 as its only argument.
 .RS
-.IP \*(BU 2m
+.IP \(bu
 .B .Perl
-.IP \*(BU 2m
+.IP \(bu
 .B .Perl start
 .RE
 .
@@ -180,9 +175,9 @@ Of course, it would be reasonable to add the argument
 that's possible, but not necessary.
 .
 .RS
-.IP \*(BU 2m
+.IP \(bu
 .B .Perl stop
-.IP \*(BU 2m
+.IP \(bu
 .BI .Perl " other_than_start"
 .RE
 .