[Groff] Nesting font macros in man pages

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi folks,

The ksh93 man page has the following in its source:

    .SS Field Splitting.
    After parameter expansion and command substitution,
    the results of substitutions are scanned for the field separator
    characters (those found in
    .SM
    .B IFS\^\c
    )
    and split into distinct fields where such characters are found.

I think the intention here was to get back to the normal-size roman font
after "IFS" without introducing a stretchable space (hence \c) but still
leave some room between the small bold IFS and the closing parenthesis,
hance the hair space \^.

My question is, were the man macros intended to work this way?  Should
we expect ")" to render in a small font, or full-size roman?

I ask because I have a change to the TP macro I'm testing on my system
that would, I think, make font life easier for a lot of man page
writers.  To my shock, the impact of that change was only about 1 dozen
out of the ~6,900 pages on my system, but the above was one of them.
(Most of those 1 dozen were in the man-db and groff packages, too.)

Regards,
Branden