Re: grohtml: confused about constant-width font handling

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:37:14 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260120173714.nqecu2qf4nnf62aa@illithid>

At 2026-01-20T15:32:20+0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 03:20:55PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > My current plan is to add the following preamble to the affected
> > pages:
> > 
> >  .ie n .ds CR R
> >  .el .ds CR CR
> > 
> > ... and then just use `.ft \*(CR` in each of the places where it
> > currently has a conditional.
> 
> On reflection, in this particular case I think these pages could just
> use .EX/.EE instead of messing around with fonts manually.

Yes!  I think this is one reason I didn't give much priority to this
issue.

_Usually_, when a document, and especially a man page, wants to bust
into a monospaced font, it wants to do so in a _display_--one that is
set exclusively with a monospaced font family.

> However, the HTML output problem remains.

A back-of-the-envelope solution might be to hack up groff man(7)'s `EX`
and `EE` macros to inject a "<div style="font-family: mono>" into the
former and "</div>" into the latter.

Caveat: I don't actually know how to spell the CSS for what I'm talking
about.  Don't take the foregoing literally.

`EX` and `EE` already have special machinery for dealing with the "dvi"
and "lbp" output devices, so all one needs to do is follow that control
structure model for "html".

https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/an.tmac?h=1.24.0.rc1#n1117

If I'm correct about how constrained this solution is (if it works),
then if this is something you have the time to tackle, I can see it
getting in to 1.24.0 final.  At present, only C/C++ code is frozen, and
I have one more macro package-affecting ticket I want to try to dispose
of.  It happens to be an mdoc(7) cousin of this very issue.[1]

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66126

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)