URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67057>
Summary: allow pairwise delimiters for all escape sequences
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: barx
Submitted: Sat 26 Apr 2025 11:07:39 PM CDT
Category: Core
Severity: 1 - Wish
Item Group: Feature change
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Sat 26 Apr 2025 11:07:39 PM CDT By: Dave <barx>
In 2002 (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2002-11/msg00136.html) Werner wrote, "It
is on my TODO list to implement \X[...] for all X (similar to sqtroff)." This
ticket puts it on groff's global to-do list.
The below demo shows that in almost-latest groff, at least \h continues to
reject (or, rather, accept but warn about) square brackets as delimiters.
$ groff-latest --version | head -1
GNU groff version 1.23.0.3096-5fe64-dirty
$ echo "a\h[12n]b" | groff-latest -Tascii -ww | cat -s
troff:<standard input>:1: warning: closing delimiter does not match; expected
character '[', got character ']'
a b
(In followup posts, Egil Kvaleberg says he coded this, as part of a larger
image-related patch. Werner asked him to separate the two patches. The final
form of the image patch was posted at
http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2003-02/msg00017.html and committed in
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c96ad7986 commit
c96ad7986], but if Egil ever posted the delimiter patch, I can't find it.)
This enhancement offers no new functionality, but gives authors a tool to
improve code readability, and, per Werner, increases cross-roff compatibility.
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