Re: [Groff] .IP quoting incompatibility

[Russ Allbery]

Colin Watson <address@hidden> writes:

> [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.]

Thank you very much for your analysis!  It helped me track down a
long-standing bug in Pod::Man and fix it, hopefully once and for all and
for all versions of *roff.

> $"" 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.

While Unix nroff is definitely buggy here, after looking at this I found
that .Ip was never actually used for anything important in Pod::Man.  It
was originally a wrapper around .IP that let one change the .ne value, but
Pod::Man doesn't use that capability.

Replacing the calls to .Ip with calls to .IP and removing a level of
quoting seems to fix the problem for both groff and Unix nroff; Unix nroff
apparently can deal okay with one level of quoting, just not with two.

This fix is in the latest release of podlators, which I'm releasing right
now, and therefore should be in the next released versions of Perl.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>