Re: [Groff] .IP quoting incompatibility

[Colin Watson]

[Russ, we're discussing http://bugs.debian.org/20277 about the rendering
of $" in perlvar(1) - the discussion on the groff mailing list starts at
http://ffii.org/archive/mails/groff/2001/Jun/0029.html.]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 at 16:41:23 +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> Thanks a lot!  So it seems to be really a bug in many non-GNU versions
> of troff.  I'll document it eventually.
> 
> Just curious:  What does
> 
>   .de xx
>   \\$1
>   .br
>   ..
>   .
>   .xx "$""\&"""
>   .xx "$""\&""\&"
> 
> produce on those `buggy' troff versions?

$"" for both. However, all of these:

  .Ip "$""" 8
  .Ip "$""\&" 8

... in the context of the original query produce garbage or just $ with
the UNIX troff versions I mentioned. I'd originally thought getting
Pod::Man not to enclose various things in quotes would help, but it
seems harder than that.

The only reliable way I've found so far to get that bit of perlvar(1)
looking right on both UNIX and GNU troff is to discard the quotes around
the first argument to .IP, avoid the issue of literal quotes in the
argument, and use something like this:

  .de Ip \" List item
  .br  
  .ie \\n(.$>=3 .ne \\$3
  .el .ne 3
  .IP \\$1 \\$2
  ..

[...]

  .ds S" ""

[...]

  .Ip "$LIST_SEPARATOR" 8
  .IX Item "$LIST_SEPARATOR"
  .PD 0
  .if n .Ip "$\*(S"" 8
  .el .Ip "$\*(S"" 8

I haven't fully tested this, though.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                     address@hidden