At 2022-08-02T14:14:58+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> I'd like to be able to produce ASCII HT ('\t' - horizontal tab) in man
> pages output. I don't want to align things; I do want a tab
> character. Rationale: examples in fstab(5).
>
> Is that possible? I didn't find anything in groff_char(7).As I understand it, this can't be done portably across output drivers (PostScript, terminals, HTML). Recall the broad variety of terminals in existence; they may not necessarily support tabs (though many do), and those that do don't necessarily use an ASCII tab character to move between them. That's a formatting concern, like carriage returns and line feeds. Further, the very idea of a "tab stop" is not essential for a device capable of general and precise positioning, like a plotter, or a page description language (PostScript, PDF). Are you trying to ensure that copy-and-paste will work? I don't think that's feasible. What the groff documentation often does is use a right arrow special character to indicate a tab, and tells the user so. doc/ms.ms-.PP doc/ms.ms-In this document, doc/ms.ms:a right arrow (\[->]) is used to indicate a tab character in the input. doc/ms.ms-. doc/ms.ms-. You can tell grotty(1) to use explicit tab characters instead of spaces for motion to the next tab stop, but that requires a command-line option. A man page has no control over that, nor even if grotty(1) will be the output driver. Can you elucidate your objective? Why do you want a tab character? Regards, Branden
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