On 2023-10-22 14:06, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> mandoc only supports 
> ASCII strings as arguments to \w, not escape sequences or formatting 
> instructions.

For the TZDB man pages mandoc need not support all that, just \(bu.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I reproduced the problem by 
running the command "mandoc -man -Tascii t.5", where t.5 contains the 
following lines:

         .TH tzfile 5
         .SH NAME
         .IP \(bu "\w'\(bu  'u"
         xxx
         .PP
         yyy

The output should contain two spaces between the bullet's "o" and the 
"x", but with current mandoc it contains five spaces.

Proposed mandoc patch attached. This isn't a perfect emulation of groff, 
nor have I tested with fancy constructs, but it should be good enough 
for tzfile(5).