Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Dan Plassche]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 7:07 PM Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

>
> The stated reason was that the output was device-independent, unlike
> output that embeds formatting codes derived from device-specific termcap
> entries, and they really liked the bold and underlining rather than the
> plain text or *ad hoc* markup produced by Pod::Text.

Overstrikes are more easily filtered and transformed for other output
formats than levels of nested escape codes that are terminal specific.

Enscript from Adobe, and the more featureful GNU replacement, are good
examples of tools designed to work with nroff or other daisywheel/line
printer output using overstrikes.   The preformatted line and page
layout are fully retained with all overstrikes rendered properly and
the ability to use any font (converted) in the postscript output,
which is awesome for printing historical documents designed for nroff.
You can also easily pass custom roff overstrikes to simulate combined
typewriter characters beyond bold and underline.

I have no major objection to using escape sequences and agree they
open some additional possibilities for functionality in modern
terminal emulators.  However, I think that most people using
overstrikes  have less as the pager in raw mode where underlines and
bold display correctly for manual pages.  It's a shame that early pc
vga consoles did not display underlines or italics properly!  Most
other *nix platforms did, and that's really not a problem in X or
modern graphical consoles like wscons on NetBSD that display
overstrikes correclty.

Best,

Dan

-- 
Dan Plassche