Re: [Groff] Re: new grotty format

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 11:03:52AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > I'd like to disable the SGR escapes for grotty at least in the Debian
> > package until they can be fixed, in an pre-emptive attempt to stem the
> > tide of bug reports. What method should I use for this? GROFF_NO_SGR=0?
> > GROFF_SGR=1? The latter seems neatest.
> 
> Setting GROFF_NO_SGR to any value will disable SGR.

Unfortunately, more is the default pager, and man has to work out of the
box without having to set obscure environment variables. I'm not really
keen on adding groff-version-specific hacks to man (and there are
probably other programs that call groff and don't speak SGR, anyway), so
I'd rather delay the transition for a while to minimize the user support
that's needed.

I was hoping to get some kind of consensus on the cleanest way to
disable SGR system-wide. I initially thought that I should write a patch
which created a 'color' number register which would have a similar
effect as 'troff -c', so that it could be controlled from man.local and
mdoc.local. However, I don't think that 'troff -c' can currently affect
how grotty renders the bold and underline fonts.

> I fully agree.  Hopefully, groff will put some pressure on the
> maintainers of those pagers to fix the issues ASAP.

I'm certainly willing to try to help fix those issues - just don't want
to break things too much for bystanding users in the interim.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  address@hidden