Re: [Groff] pic and nroff

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Coming back to the original problem, I think this is due to a
> "misunderstanding" between pic and grotty.

More or less, yes.

> Anyhow, pic sets the fill color to black for filling the arrowheads,
> and from that point on grotty writes all text with a black
> background.  The fix appears to be rather easy: let pic set the fill
> color not to black (\D'Fg 0.000'), but to "default" (\D'Fd'); this
> seems to work correctly with grops and also lets grotty write the
> text normally.

The fix is not easy, unfortunately.  Arrow heads are always filled
with the outline colour, which is black.  `pic' thus has to change the
fill colour accordingly.  I can't imagine any way to make that work
automatically work with TTYs.

I see various solutions.

  1. Set pic's `arrowhead' style variable to 0 so that arrowheads
     aren't filled.  It's probably worth to handle this with a new
     command line option for `pic', similar to option -n (which does
     more than that).

  2. Undo an optimization within pic which currently assumes that fill
     and glyph colours are completely independent.  This would mean
     that after a filled object the fill colour is immediately reset
     to the default.

  3. Say `.color 0' before and `.color 1' after the image.  [This is
     the first time I see a useful application of this request which
     I've introduced a long time ago :-)]

Comments, please.


     Werner