Werner Lemberg just announced groff 1.18. Of particular interest: Grotty ------
o Color support has been added, using the SGR (ISO 6429, sometimes called ANSI color) escape sequences. o SGR escape sequences are now used by default for underlining and bold printing also, no longer using the backspace character trick. To revert to the old behaviour, use the '-c' switch. Note that you have to use the '-R' option of 'less' to make SGR escapes display correctly. On the other hand, terminal programs and consoles like 'xterm' which support SGR sequences natively can directly display the output of grotty. Consequently, the options '-b', '-B', '-u', and '-U' work only in combination with '-c' and are ignored silently otherwise. For the 'man' program, it may be necessary to add the '-R' option of 'less' to the $PAGER environment variable; alternatively, you can use 'man's '-P' option (or adapt its configuration file accordingly). See man(1) for more details. o If the environment variable GROFF_NO_SGR is set, SGR output is disabled, reverting to the old behaviour. o A new special \X'tty: sgr n' has been added; if n is non-zero or missing, enable SGR output (the default). o If the new option '-i' is used (only in SGR mode), grotty sends escape sequences to set the italic font attribute instead of the underline attribute for italic fonts. Note that many terminals don't have support for this (including xterm). ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/ The last of the above items, together with the availability of several -misc-fixed-* italic fonts in XFree86 will hopefully encourage terminal emulator authors to look into supporting the SGR sequence for switching to an italic font. I also hope, this release will mark the death of the old backspace convention for producing bold and underlined text in manual pages. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
