Generation process for cpp.1

[Russ Allbery]

Zack Weinberg <zackw@Stanford.EDU> writes:

> There's one remaining concern with 5.6.0+ pod2man.  texi2pod generates
> lines like this:

> =item B<-A I<predicate>=I<answer>>

> which is rendered as 

> .Ip "\fB\-A \f(BIpredicate\fB=\f(BIanswer\fB\fR" 4

> by pod2man.  The old one used to generate

> .Ip "\fB\-A \fIpredicate\fR=\fIanswer\fR\fR" 4

> What I actually *want* is what .BI does, i.e.

> .Ip "\fB\-A \fIpredicate\fB=\fIanswer\fR" 4

> I know I could get this by emitting

> =item B<-A> I<predicate>B<=>I<answer>

> but it's quite difficult to get there from the texinfo input.  (I might
> add that the new rendering, with \f(BI, looks just fine when rendered
> into Postscript.  The trouble is that nroff renders \f(BI identically
> with \fB.  Or rather, less renders "_^Hp^Hp" as bold, not bold and
> underlined.)

Hurm.  I'm not really sure what to do about this.  That POD asks for both
bold and italic text, and *roff has a font for both bold and italic, which
is what pod2man is giving.  The old pod2man was technically incorrect
there, not producing the fonts warranted by the markup.

It really feels to me like this is a bug in less, as bold underlined text
is possible in at least xterms and can be set with the standard ANSI
escape sequences for character attributes.

> I also have a problem with `scare quotes', since X 4.0 has decided that
> ' is to be vertical.  No solution, though.  It may be possible to
> bludgeon the fonts into restoring a tilted-right '.

The next version of podlators will default to using "" instead of `'
because of this issue, with a command-line option allowing you to set the
quotes to anything that you want.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             < http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ >