Re: [Groff] Escape characters in -man output

[Keith MARSHALL]

Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:
> Setting GROFF_NO_SGR seems cleaner than calling groff with -P-c all
> the time (or even aliasing it).
>
> However, it uses the old way of backspacing for bold.
> There is a better way that uses ASCII escape sequences.
> Try
>                MANPAGER="more -R"
>                export MANPAGER

That works fine, when your system *properly* supports SGR, (and when
"more" really means "less" -- as yours does -- or it otherwise has
"less" compatible support for the "-R" option).  It isn't a viable
solution for a Win32 console, because, if SGR works at all, it most
likely isn't adequately emulated -- the MSYS implementation, which I
use, can switch on the bold and italic highlighting features, but it
doesn't recognise the escape sequences to individually switch them
off again!

However, if you use "nroff" rather than "groff" to format manpages
for display on the console, then it is sufficient to specify just
the "-c" option -- "nroff" takes care of passing the "-P-c" option
to "grotty", in this case.  Thus, my Win32 "man.conf" says

        PAGER           d:/path/to/less -is
        NROFF           d:/path/to/nroff -Tlatin1 -mandoc -c

which, without exporting GROFF_NO_SGR, is sufficient to make

        man foo

display the manpage for "foo" correctly, whereas

        PAGER           d:/path/to/less -isR
        NROFF           d:/path/to/groff -Tlatin1 -mandoc

results in an untidy mess of inappropriate highlighting, and needs
the addition of the "-c" and "-P-c" options on the NROFF line, and
removal of "-R" from the PAGER, to fix it.

BTW, "man.conf" also specifies a TROFF configuration, such as

        TROFF           d:/path/to/groff -Tps -mandoc

This is used *only* when the "-t" option is given to "man", which
indicates that the manpage should be typeset for hardcopy printing;
"man" *always* selects the formatter specified by NROFF, to format
any manpage for viewing through the PAGER.

HTH.

Regards,
Keith.