[Groff] \X and grohtml

[Werner LEMBERG]

Gaius,


what's the reason to represent special characters of the form \[foo]
as \(foo\) in the `x X' intermediate output command?  Why not \[foo]
also?  If this is possible, can you change it, please?

Reason for the question is my efforts to implement a .device request
(almost) equal to \X.  All requests which take an arbitrary string
(.write, .ds, etc.) read this argument in `copy mode'.  This means
that \[foo] isn't interpreted specially but copied verbatim.  I would
like to avoid special code which makes the argument handling of
.device different to similar requests, and having \[foo] in the
intermediate output also makes this possible.

At a first glance I couldn't find a particular reason for \(foo\)...


    Werner