[Groff] Re: \X and grohtml

[Gaius Mulley]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

> 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?

Hi Werner,

[sorry I missed this email earlier]

Yes I see no reason why \[foo] cannot be used - it was originally
there to pass glyph names inside "specials" to post-grohtml to allow
for URLs to include glyphs rather than just single ascii characters.
I can implement this if you wish..

> Reason for the question is my efforts to implement a .device request

excellent..

> (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 \(foo\)...

yes I think this is correct..

regards,
Gaius