[BUG] groff: inconsistent behavior of " to separate arguments

[Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)]

Hi Branden,

I've met some undocumented (or I couldn't find it) behavior of double
quotes ("), which might be a bug in groff(1):

$ cat arg.7
.TH foo 7 foo foo foo
.SH Test
.IR "foo"bar
.IR foo"bar"
.IR "foo"bar"baz"


$ man ./arg.7 | cat
foo(7)                         foo                        foo(7)

Test
       foobar foo"bar" foobar"baz"

foo                            foo                        foo(7)


When a double-quoted word is not space-separated from an adjacent word,
it's not considered a different argument _except_ if if is the first
argument.  Is that exceptional behavior expected?

Could you please improve the documentation regarding '"'?
I've also seen """ to mean \(dq in some manual pages.
I guess the behavior is related to this report,
but I'd like to understand why it works that way.

Thanks,

Alex

-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/