Re: [Groff] escaping punctuation in mdoc pages

[jmc]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 01:22:54PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> 
> > Ruslan, can you document this better in groff_mdoc.man?
> > 
> This is basically already documented in the General Syntax section
> of the aforementioned manpage.  What's probably missing is the lists
> of recognized opening and closing punctuation characters.  Should I
> add these?
> 

Well, my old mdoc.samples(7) page used to show the macros like this:

        Usage: .Ad address ... { . , ; : ( ) [ ]}

The new page no longer shows this, and has only...

        Usage: .Ad <address> ...

Furthermore, there is still this:

Troff is limited as a macro language, and has difficulty when presented
with a string containing a member of the mathematical, logical or
quotation set:

        {+,-,/,*,%,<,>,<=,>=,=,==,&,`,',"}

"...and has difficulty when presented with...". When? There is no
indication when. I should escape all of them? What about "++"?

{Free,Net,Open}BSD have the following in chmod(1):

        .It \&\-
        .It +
        .It =

as well as
                                  
        the ``\-'' operation has no effect.

So, what rules are in operation here?

I think there really should be something which says *exactly* which
characters could need escaping (the list Werner gave me is different to
that one above) and *when*.

jmc.
-- 
Your time is yours, dinna let ithers spend it.