Follow-up Comment #18, bug #68497 (group groff): At 2026-07-06T05:11:37-0400, garavel wrote: > Follow-up Comment #14, bug #68497 (group groff): > > A side remark: replacing groff -man by groff -mgan raises no exception > on all my man pages, but one, which contains an instruction: > > .if t .so /usr/share/lib/tmac/ms.acc
...uh...on a different node, why is your man(7) document attempting to
load a module of the ms(7) package? That is not documented as supported
by any AT&T troff I know of, and it certainly is not by groff.
If this tactic is being used as a convenient way to get accented
characters into a man page, it's a bad idea--and not just for reasons of
potential cross-package namespace interference.
"ms.acc" itself is a crude instrument, as groff's "ms.ms" manual
explains.
9. Legacy features
groff ms retains some legacy features solely to support formatting of his‐
torical documents; contemporary ones should not use them because they can
render poorly. See groff_char(7) instead.
9.1. AT&T ms accent mark strings
AT&T ms defined accent mark strings as follows.
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ String Description │
├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ \*['] Apply acute accent to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[`] Apply grave accent to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[:] Apply dieresis (umlaut) to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[^] Apply circumflex accent to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[~] Apply tilde accent to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[C] Apply caron to subsequent glyph. │
│ \*[,] Apply cedilla to subsequent glyph. │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
There is no _portable_ way to enjoy substantial coverage of characters
not encoded by ISO 646/ASCII in the man(7) package. nroff was written
for Teletype machines, line printers, and daisy-wheel printers, all of
which devices that could constructively overstrike because they produced
output on paper. Character-cell video terminals, never a type of device
targeted by the Bell Labs CSRC whence troff arose, generally cannot.
As suggested above, rendering composite glyphs by overstriking is a
crude technique anyway, even on typesetters that can honor such
instructions.
If you're willing to give up portability to old AT&T troffs,
groff_char(7) documents several mechanisms.
What is it your man(7) document is trying to do?
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