Re: info browser handles OSC 8 escape sequences poorly (was: [platform-testers] texinfo-7.2.90 pretest available)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:42:38 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.bugs
Message-ID	<20260112134238.3jtilj3njbixkqff@illithid>

Hi Eli,

At 2026-01-12T15:19:19+0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:32:39 -0600
> > From: "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]>
> > 
> > 
> > If these problems have gone unraised by Texinfo users for a long
> > time, my surmise is that users of info(1), and of GNU Emacs's WoMan
> > man browser, have such low expectations of their rendering that they
> > disregard any formatting errors they see.  I observe that, for
> > example, WoMaN, which apparently attempts to parse man(7) document
> > input for itself instead of entrusting it to a man(1) program or to
> > the nroff command, misrenders `\c` and `\:` escape sequences.[9]
> 
> Your surmise is evidently based on incomplete or inaccurate
> information.

Apparently so!  I am not a sophisticated Emacs user; I'm familiar with
the MicroEmacs feature set but little else.

> The WoMan package in Emacs is deprecated, have not seen any
> significant maintenance for many years, and as result doesn't support
> many directives used in modern man pages.

Ah!  Since that is the case, are there plans to withdraw WoMan from
distribution?  If someone wants to revive it, they could always do so
via ELPA, right?

> The supported Emacs command to read man pages is "M-x man", which runs
> the system's 'man' command, and then displays what that produces.

In GNU Emacs 27.1--which I acknowledge is pretty old--I see that "M-x
man" _also_ passes through OSC 8 sequences mostly uninterpreted.
("Mostly": It translates the literal escape characters that begin these
sequences into Basic Latin as the `^[` sequence, coloring them cyan.[1])

I assume that bug has since been fixed.  Can you tell me in which
release it was?  There's a non-zero chance the question will come up on
the groff mailing list, and I'd like to be prepared with an answer.

> (The Emacs Info reader also doesn't show man pages like the
> stand-alone Info reader from Texinfo does.)

Okay.

Thanks for putting me in the picture regarding the best way to use GNU
Emacs as a man page renderer.

Regards,
Branden

[1] Unicode hyphens (U+2010) are also colored cyan.  Good show!  This
    choice is a useful aid for man page writers who trouble themselves
    to care about the distinction between 0+002D and U+2010.  This
    choice makes it easy to confirm that they're being used correctly.
    I appreciate that.

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