Hi folks, The ksh93 man page has the following in its source:
.SS Field Splitting. After parameter expansion and command substitution, the results of substitutions are scanned for the field separator characters (those found in .SM .B IFS\^\c ) and split into distinct fields where such characters are found. I think the intention here was to get back to the normal-size roman font after "IFS" without introducing a stretchable space (hence \c) but still leave some room between the small bold IFS and the closing parenthesis, hance the hair space \^. My question is, were the man macros intended to work this way? Should we expect ")" to render in a small font, or full-size roman? I ask because I have a change to the TP macro I'm testing on my system that would, I think, make font life easier for a lot of man page writers. To my shock, the impact of that change was only about 1 dozen out of the ~6,900 pages on my system, but the above was one of them. (Most of those 1 dozen were in the man-db and groff packages, too.) Regards, Branden