I noticed recently that, compared to previous groff releases up to and including 1.23, the latest groff built from git has less informative -a output in some instances. Consider this two-line input file.
.fschar S \[trademark] \N'228' Enjoy a glass of Fluerma\fS\[trademark]\fP tonight. Running this through "groff -a" has produced the below output from (at least) groff 1.19.2 through groff 1.23: <beginning of page> Enjoy a glass of Fluerma<S trademark> tonight. This output has now changed. The fact that it HAS changed, I'm OK with: -a is billed as approximate output and subject to change. But the nature of its change makes it, I think, less useful. The -a output under the latest groff code is: <beginning of page> Enjoy a glass of Fluerma<---> tonight. This is straightforwardly enough less useful that I opened what I thought would be an uncontroversial bug report about it ( http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67817). In particular, if a document has 100 such character definitions, they ALL get transformed into "<--->" rather than each into a unique string as they used to. Branden has argued in favor of the change, in a way I won't attempt to summarize for fear of misrepresenting his position; you can read his response at that URL, or wait for his inevitable reply here. In any case, I am following his suggestion of writing here to solicit more input about this change. Is the new output better? Is the old better? Can you think of another representation that would be better than either of those options? (keeping in mind that -a output intentionally follows no specification and need not maintain any particular compatibility with other roffs) Thanks for your input.
