distributor patches to man pages' character mappings (was: Inconsistent TC Section Title Indentation in mm?)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Sun, 7 Dec 2025 02:28:16 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20251207082816.zfdtcgwxjs7mrpfo@illithid>

At 2025-12-07T09:10:27+0100, Alexis (surryhill) wrote:
> my fallback groff is the stable version 1.23.0 with the
> only following added man.local and mdoc.local in site-tmac:
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/by-name/gr/groff/site.tmac

[Abraham Simpson shakes fist at cloud]

groff_man_style(7):

Notes
       Some tips on composing and troubleshooting your man pages follow.
...
       • When and how should I use quotation marks?
...
         Obtaining directional single quotation marks is more of a
         challenge.  Historically, man pages used ` and ' exclusively
         for them.  However, in recent years, some distributors of groff
         have chosen to override the meanings of these characters in man
         pages, remapping them to their Unicode Basic Latin code points.
         Unfortunately, ` and ' are the only reliable means of obtaining
         directional single quotation marks in AT&T troff; in that
         implementation, often no special character escape sequences
         exist to obtain them.  Further, AT&T troff’s special character
         identifiers, like its font names, were device‐specific.  To
         achieve quotation portably in man pages rendered both by AT&T
         and more modern troffs, consider adding a preamble to your page
         after the TH call as follows.

                .ie \n(.g \{\
                .  ds oq \[oq]\"
                .  ds cq \[cq]\"
                .\}
                .el \{\
                .  ds oq `\"
                .  ds cq '\"
                .\}

         You must then use the \* escape sequence to interpolate the
         quotation mark strings.

                The command
                .RB \*(oq "while !\& git pull; do sleep 10; done" \*(cq
                retries an update from the repository until it succeeds.

         If this procedure seems complex, petition your distributor to
         revert their remapping of the ` and ' characters.

Regards,
Branden

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