Hi all,

exploring mm's macros I was a bit surprised to see a dashed line
slightly intended above the organizational affiliation on mm's
default cover page when using the T (default) or H font family.

With other font families (A, C, BM) the line appears solid.
Looking at m.tmac the line is drawn using the `\[em]` character and I
wonder whether the line would better be drawn using the default
line character when in troff mode to ensure it is always a solid
regardless of the active font family.

What do people think?

Please find attached a patch, a minimal working example, and two PDF
documents demonstrating the mwe output before and after the patch
was applied.

Can others reproduce this "issue"?
I'd greatly appreciated if folks ould provide additional or historical
context to help with my understanding of groff and in this ase mm.


Best
Alexis



—————
P.S: I'm using a groff built from the latest changeset; as of this
writing that is 2542eb3f2ef12be6696e0e305937f82f87549df5
from Fri Dec 5 07:02:13 2025 -0600 and have the following environment
variables set:
GROFF_ENCODING=utf-8
GROFF_TYPESETTER=pdf
diff --git i/contrib/mm/mm/0.MT w/contrib/mm/mm/0.MT
index 69883c0ef..c5a07f49e 100644
--- i/contrib/mm/mm/0.MT
+++ w/contrib/mm/mm/0.MT
@@ -223,7 +223,8 @@ http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff.
 .sp |\\n[cov*top1]u
 .nr cov*saved-adjustment \\n[.j]
 .ad l
-.nop \l'\\n[.l]u\[em]'
+.ie t .nop \l'\\n[.l]u'
+.el   .nop \l'\\n[.l]u\[em]'
 .\" DWB 3.3 mm set the firm name in bold on nroff devices, and
 .\" Helvetica roman on troff devices.  Register `E` had no effect on it.
 .ie t .if F HR .fam H
.TL
Minimal Working Example
.br
for Rule Above Associated Organization
.AU
.AF Organization
.MT 0

Attachment: mwe-mm-firm-rule-before.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Attachment: mwe-mm-firm-rule-after.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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