Re: mdocml: Accomodate for \f(Cx formatting.

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Kristaps,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 01:14:34AM +0100:
> On 12/11/2011 23:40, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> the meaning of the "C*" font family is not "constant width" in general.
>> Even in groff, its meaning is output-device dependent, and only a few
>> devices support it: mainly -Tps and -Thtml, but not -Tascii or -Tdvi.
>>
>> Even in groff -Tps, its meaning isn't "constant width", but rather
>> "Adobe Courier".  There are many other -Tps families we do not
>> support (A, BM, H, HN, N, P, T).  Even when aiming for groff -Tps C*
>> support only, this patch is incomplete, \f[CBI] is missing.
>>
>> Hence, i mildly disagree with this patch - but merged it anyway
>> because it doesn't do that much harm.  I do think, however, that
>> any font escape except \fR \fI \fB \f1 \f2 \f3 \fP merits a warning
>> that it's utterly non-portable both regarding different roff
>> implementations and even regarding different output devices.
>>
>> I don't consider this an urgent matter at all, but thought
>> i'd bring this up in case anybody has more thoughts on the
>> subject...

> Hm, you have a good point.  Maybe mention should be omitted
> from the manual to avoid encouraging this bad behaviour?

Yes, i think that is a good idea.

We might accept \f(.[BIR123] and drop *any* middle character
from it, in case people use \f(TB or \f(PI, but that's very
low priority.  Then again, such hacks will never be complete,
and just dropping such escapes is fine with me, too.

> And while yes, in principle warning about bad formatting tokens is a
> good idea -- there just so many of them!

Well, at some point i'll probably look into that, it can't be
that hard.  But it's not high priority either.

Yours,
  Ingo
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