The BOLD entries in manpages

[Ray Shwake]

rg at msel.unh.edu (Roger Gonzalez) writes:

>          Through this I discovered that I could not get anything in
>bold to come out on the screen, even though its defined in the termcap
>and in the manpage. 

Termcap and terminfo references to bold, underline, etc. define the codes
to be sent to the terminal to invoke these characteristics, but nroff does
not generate these codes. It does not, after all, generate for the terminal.

>                     The italic entries come out underlined.  

On the several systems I've used, "italic" generates character-backspace-
underline (or is it underline-backspace-char?), while "bold" generates
char-backspace-char-backspace-char-backspace-char. Only on some terminals
I've used will italic appear as underline, while the bold appears as a
standard character.

>                                                    I looked at the output
>from nroff -man with a hex dumper, and the underline codes are there, but
>not anything where the bold should be!  I had previously assumed that the
>'more' command was eating it, but its not even getting that far!

This "underline code" sounds more like a troff code, since (see above) it
shouldn't be generating terminal-specific code.

>I've got a good terminal that can do underlining, bold, dim, reverse,
>overlining, flash, etc. etc. and it would be nice to use some of these.

What you might want to do is post process the nroff output into the
'less' pager, which is smart enough to interpret the character stream and,
based on your terminal definition, generate the terminal-specific code to
invoke underline, bold, etc.

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