Hi Pádraig, At 2026-10-05T19:05:47+0100, Pádraig Brady wrote: > With POSIX (and the LI18NUX2000 patch) backspaces back up by 1 column. > This matches terminal output. Note less(1) and thus groff(1) > use per character backup accounting for their legacy bold/underline > markup format,
Strictly, this is more specifically a grotty(1) convention than a
groff(1) one. (Of course grotty is part of the GNU roff suite of
programs.)
Because it has a subsection addressing the legacy, overstriking
("backup") output format and its drawbacks, mentioning the grotty(1) man
page instead in your final commit log might be helpful to those prone to
fulminate over how "stupid"[1] groff is for assuming that people view
and page documents on emulators of _video_ terminals these days far, far
more often than on emulators of hardcopy devices like the Teletype
Corporation Model 37 used at the Bell Labs CSRC, which could
constructively overstrike.
Regards,
Branden
[1]
https://github.com/ThomasDickey/old-xterm/blob/543587381c8fd63b363c55d469a0f770f76cf1bf/Makefile.in#L220
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