Re: [Groff] escaping punctuation in mdoc pages

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 08:12:11PM +0200, jmc wrote:
[...]
> 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 "++"?
> 
I don't believe there's such a difficulty with -mdocNG.
Well, certain characters need escaping, like `,', and
printing `"' is still tricky.  But others should ok.

> {Free,Net,Open}BSD have the following in chmod(1):
> 
>       .It \&\-
> 
The \& is unnecessary here.

>       .It +
>       .It =
> 
These are perfectly valid.

> as well as
>                                 
>       the ``\-'' operation has no effect.
> 
The `\-' represents the minus character, while `-' is the
(short) dash.  The difference is visible in troff mode.

> So, what rules are in operation here?
> 
Punctuation characters, those, recognized by -mdoc, should
be escaped if they do not denote a punctuation.

grep "doc-punct" doc-common

> 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*.
> 
I'd have liked that `{', `}', `<', and `>' be also made
recognizeable punctuation characters.  The `/' would be
good to have as well.  I will have to see how many pages
break if I do this.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov          Sysadmin and DBA,
address@hidden          Sunbay Software Ltd,
address@hidden          FreeBSD committer

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