At 2025-12-15T16:07:26-0600, Dave Kemper wrote: > 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.
I found the change responsible for the commit. I was able to revert it cleanly (i.e., no merge conflicts). You might be interested in what it was. $ git show 3d249f79fd662e0e033ee1dc564f242b1a753e3c|cat commit 3d249f79fd662e0e033ee1dc564f242b1a753e3c Author: G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> Date: Mon Mar 17 01:19:54 2025 -0500 [troff]: Fix Savannah #55799 (`-a` opt + `char`). * src/roff/troff/node.cpp (composite_node::ascii_print): When rendering a composite node for approximate output, traverse into it and write its nodes' representations in forward order. Fixes <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55799>. Thanks to Dave Kemper for the report. Problem appears to date back to groff's birth. Regards, Branden
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