Hello Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Aug 09, 2026 at 03:18:31AM -0500: > Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>>> * Neutral apostrophes ' render incorrectly as U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE >>> QUOTATION MARK and copy-and-paste that way, too. >> All that sounds related to being an ASCII rather than a UTF-8 output >> mode. > I agree, except for the second point. Does "mandoc -T ps" emit the > PostScript "quoteright" or "quotesingle" glyph for `'`? The input string "it's" which i consider as a typical string containing a neutral apostrophe, renders as: * U+0027 APOSTROPHE in mandoc(1) and groff(1) -T ascii * U+0027 APOSTROPHE in mandoc(1) and groff(1) -T utf8 * (it's) in mandoc(1) and groff(1) -T ps I'm not particularly good at PostScript, but both mandoc(1) and groff(1) appear to be using the same /Times-Roman font, so both appear to be using the same output glyph from the same font, which inspection with gv(1) appears to confirm. Unsurprsingly, the groff(1) output looks better, apparently because it does proper kerning between (it') and (s), which mandoc(1) does not even attempt, leaving the two too far apart. The glyphs appear to be the same. Inspecting the Adobe glyphlist https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-aglfn/blob/master/glyphlist.txt i find quoteright;2019 quotesingle;0027 which means the answer to your question is that both mandoc(1) and groff(1) emit "quotesingle". > 'Course, if the font doesn't distinguish these--or worse, "quotesingle" > is unavailable--your output is up a creek anyway. Not sure whether the default /Times-Roman font *contains* a quoteright glyph - but mandoc(1) -T ps certainly does not use it, it only uses ASCII printable glyphs, so mandoc(1) -T ps renders even \[u2019] as "quotesingle". >>> * I see errors (missing space between words) in synopsis formatting; >>> mandoc(1)'s support for the groff man `SY` and `YS` extensions may >>> be lacking--or, since mandoc(1) hasn't had a release in a few >>> years, those flaws might be fixed in its "HEAD".[...] >> If that is reproducible in -T ascii mode, it's possibly a .SY >> formatting bug in the man_term.c formatter. If not, i'd be somewhat >> surprised. > I can't reproduce the problem in that output format. > > $ mandoc -T ascii ~/groff-1.24.1/share/man/man1/chem.1 |head > chem(1) General Commands Manual chem(1) > > Name > chem - embed chemical structure diagrams in groff documents > > Synopsis > chem [--] [file ...] > > chem -h Hmmm. Strange. With -current mandoc -T ps, the spacing that should be present in these two Synopsis lines (after chem, [--], file, and chem) is all present. Quick testing with 1.14.6... terminal output: OK; -T ps oops... Spacing missing after "chem" on the Synopsis lines, just like you say. No idea what was going on there. I believe i now addressed all your points in message. Yours, Ingo
