On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 02:55:36PM -0400, Andrew Brown wrote:
<snip> 
> >One solution would be to add -R to the default pager options
> >in usr.bin/man/pathconf.h. That should work, but users
> >setting their own PAGER would probably have to adapt.
> >less -R displays old-style man pages fine.
> >
> >Another solution is to default to the previous behaviour.
> >The command line option to switch back to compat-behaviour
> >is not a toggle, so if we want to allow the ANSI behaviour
> >too, we'd diverge a bit from "normal" groff.
> >
> >I guess I prefer option 1.
> 
> i'm tempted to urge people to consider option 2.  or does no one print
> the preformatted man pages any more?  the overstriking that groff
> currently produces when you ask for -Tascii works find in printers.
> escape characters most certainly will not.

I disagree. While I do from time to time still print manpages with groff
-Tascii etc, disabling the functionality at compile-time seems suboptimal to
me. Wouldn't it be more ideal to have a command-line option to turn the ANSI
stuff on (or off)? That could be patched in at groff2netbsd time, couldn't
it? (A signifigant portion of the GNU software we have already gets modified
by the 2netbsd scripts, so I don't see why it'd be a problem to do it to
groff as well..)

-Sean

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