No/broken handling of backspaces in the source?

No/broken handling of backspaces in the source?

[наб]

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Hi!

A common pattern in very old (especially pre-troff) manuals I read often
is "aecn^H^H^H^H____" used to underline aecn ‒ this is a trivial
consequence of being made for typewriters.

[In the following examples a diacriticised character is used to
 represent that character but underlined.]

groff handles this correctly, i.e.
  printf 'aecn\b\b\b\b____ ____\b\b\b\bAECN\n.br\na\b_\t_\bA'
is rendered by groff as
  ąęćń ĄĘĆŃ
  ą       Ą
and by less as
  ą___ ĄECN
  .br
  ą       Ą
but by mandoc (1.14.5-1 and current CVS) as
  aecn????____ ____????AECN
  a?_  _?A

It's unclear to me if this is supposed to happen, but I didn't see it in
the TODO, so.

Best,
наб

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Re: No/broken handling of backspaces in the source?

[Mingye Wang]

наб wrote:
> It's unclear to me if this is supposed to happen, but I didn't see it in
> the TODO, so.

I believe this is intended behavior for mandoc, at least with regard
to terminal output. Consult the "ASCII Output" and "Locale Output"
sections of mandoc(1), and you shall see:

>Font styles are applied by using back-spaced encoding such that [...]  > This markup is typically converted to appropriate terminal
> sequences by the pager or ul(1).  To remove the markup, pipe the
> output to col(1) -b instead.

In other words, mandoc output is not for direct consumption by the
terminal. Try using `-T html` instead -- that should tell you whether
mandoc has really interpreted the thing.

Regards,
Artoria2e5
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