Update of bug#65241 (group groff):
Severity: 3 - Normal => 1 - Wish
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Follow-up Comment #1:
[comment #0 original submission:]
> Buried in the novella that is bug #62921 is this observation:
>
> "groff's _ms_ and _me_ have support for bold-italic already (and have
> for decades), and it wouldn't be hard to add it to our _mm_ either"
>
> (This ticket merely notes that Branden has noted the feature gap. I
> know of no -mm users who have requested this feature, and the
> functionality is already available to -mm users with appropriate base
> roff requests or escapes.)
I'm personally unlikely to tackle this due to its implications for the
_mm_ macro name space.
Consider first that _mm_ has macros for selecting roman, bold, and
italic faces called `R`, `B`, and `I`, respectively.
Next consider that _mm_ also has font alternation macros like _man_;
these are `BI`, `BR`, `IB`, `IR`, `RB`, and `RI`.
Notice the preëxisting status of a macro called `BI`.
Finally, consider that even we had a macro for switching to the
bold-italic face (maybe `FBI`), orthogonality would suggest that we'd
need to add several more, to complete the Cartesian product of
alternation with the new `BI` font.
BBI
BIB
BIR
RBI
IBI
BII
I think this would become hard to decipher.
What I would suggest to _groff mm_ users instead is to temporarily remap
fonts in a context where bold-italic is desired. My suspicion is that
in most practical typesetting contexts, this will arise mainly in
situations where the non-italic face is already bold anyway. That is
the shape of solutions I have applied in _groff man_, which doesn't
expose the bold-italic face, but does _use_ it in (sub)section headings
if it infers that the configured heading font (`HF` string) represents a
bold typeface. It then temporarily remaps `I` to `BI` when setting the
headings.
Regards,
Branden
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