Re: [TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> AT&T troff was engineered around the assumption that the
> lowercase Greek letters typically used for mathematical and
> scientific typesetting are slanted/italic rather than upright.
> This assumption is baked into the semantics of special
> character names *a, *b, *g, and so forth.
> [...]
> If you couldn't guess, I plan to change this in groff.

It is not, and nothing needs to be changed.

Which character (slanted or upright) groff uses simply depends
on the mounting order of the fonts S and SS.

Example:

  .fp 5 S
  .fp 6 SS
  \(*A\(*a --> upright lowercase alpha.
  .fp 5 SS
  .fp 6 S
  \(*A\(*a --> slanted lowercase alpha.