Bullets everywhere

["Ulrich Spörlein" <uqs@spoerlein.net>]

Hello,

prompted by some gratuitous differences in groff vs mandoc output, I
wanted to ask for the rationale here (if any).

.Bl -bullet
.It 
one
.El

will print the following raw output:

mandoc:            o^Ho   one
groff[1] -Tascii:  +^H+^Ho^Ho   one
groff[1] -Tutf8:   ·^H·   one
groff[2] -Tascii:  ^[[1m+^Ho   ^[[22mone

[1] is groff 1.19.2 (the last GPLv2 release)
[2] is groff 1.20.1

HTML output of groff is kinda ridiculous:

<p style="margin-left:14%;">one</p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em" valign="top"><b>&bull;</b></p>

It's not even using <h1> for the document title ...

HTML for mandoc 1.10.9:

<ul style="margin-top: 0.00em;margin-bottom: 0.00em;" class="list list-bul">
<li class="list-bul" style="margin-top: 1.00em;">
one</li>

Not that bad, except that I think one shouldn't use multiple <h1> in one
document, but that's not the point of this email.

Postscript!

groff's output is nice (the old one, newer groff has an mdoc error
trying to produce postscript, might be my port is broken ...). The
bullets are Postscript bullets and `--' dashes also use the correct font
symbol.

Mandoc however is producing bold `o's as bullets for Postscript ...
yuck.

So what I'm mostly interested about is the +/o overprinting that groff
is trying to do. This won't work on my xterm, obviously. Was this
something that older printers could be coaxed into? Or teletypes, of
course?

Regards,
Uli
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