At 2025-10-10T15:12:12-0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Thanks, I guess I was relying too much on my 7th Edition UNIX
> reflexes; its -man package lacked \*(lq and \*(rq.

That's true TTBOMK--of the research-based sort rather than
experiential; my first exposure to Unix was DYNIX (Sequent's 4.3BSD) and
SunOS 4.  I'll stick the current state of groff_man(7)'s "History"
subsection at the end of this message for your amusement.[1]

> I'm leery of using markdown style in comments so I installed the
> attached instead.

No worries.

> I'll propagate this fix to RCS as well.

Thanks!

Regards,
Branden

[1] groff_man(7):

   History
     M. Douglas McIlroy ⟨[email protected]⟩ designed,
     implemented, and documented the AT&T man macros for Unix Version 7
     (1979) and employed them to edit Volume 1 of its Programmer’s
     Manual, a compilation of all man pages supplied by the system.  The
     package supported the macros listed in this page not described as
     extensions, except P and the deprecated AT and UC.  It documented
     no registers and defined only R and S strings.

     UC appeared in 3BSD (1980).  Unix System III (1980) introduced P
     and exposed the registers IN and LL, which had been internal to
     Seventh Edition Unix man.  PWB/Unix 2.0 (1980) added the Tm string.
     4BSD (1980) added lq and rq strings.  SunOS 2.0 (1985) recognized
     C, D, P, and X registers.  4.3BSD (1986) added AT and P.  Ninth
     Edition Unix (1986) introduced EX and EE.  SunOS 4.0 (1988) added
     SB.  Unix System V (1988) incorporated BSD’s lq and rq strings.

     Except for EX/EE, James Clark implemented the foregoing features in
     early versions of groff.  Later, groff 1.20 (2009) resurrected
     EX/EE and originated SY/YS, TQ, MT/ME, and UR/UE.  Plan 9 from User
     Space’s troff introduced MR in 2020.

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