Lately I've been noticing that less has been subtly choking on perldoc pages. Lines might appear and disappear as I scrolled up and down. I figured it was a bug in less, but no. It is far more evil.
Today I pasted some example code from "perldoc Attribute::Handlers" into a text file to write up a test based on it. The test was failing in mysterious ways. I finally figured out why. nroff (or rather groff) replaced all the ASCII single quotes in the file with fancy Unicode x2019 quotes. What?! Who thought this was a good idea?! Even if my CTYPE is set to UTF-8, NO! "Smart quote" stupidity should not leak into roff, the final bastion of the most Unixy of all Unix formatting tools! Ok, maybe this is some sort of OS X brain rot. Maybe the curvy corner, pointy-clicky heads somehow infected groff. But no! There it is, right in the pristine GNU roff source. $ grep 2019 groff-1.19.2/font/devutf8/R.proto ' 24 0 0x2019 WHY, GNU, WHY!?! To add insult to injury, the nroff TYPESETTER environment variable which can be used to override this madness isn't implemented in groff's nroff wrapper. Smart quotes in man pages. What's next? Turn ... into HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS? Turn all my math functions into DIVISION SLASH? Will the next version of groff include a clippy helper or maybe a little dog to help me? How about putting google ads at the bottom of my man pages, wouldn't that be nice. -- There will be snacks.
