grotty manpage color has gone missing and grotty color "broken"

[james]

Binary package hint: groff-base

In a recent edit of the grotty manpage, the color markup has gone missing. Most people couldn't tell, because the groff configuration from debian has "broken/disabled" the color feature, but that's a separate issue. The manpage text should be:

 This makes it possible to have eight different \M[green]background\M[]
 and \m[red]foreground\m[] colors; additionally, bold and italic

_with_ the color-markup.

While I might appreciate those who harken back to the heady days of the monochrome crt computer terminal, I am annoyed that these people should insist upon forcing others, and me in particular, into sharing their nostalgic practices.

The grotty manpage discusses grotty color features BECAUSE those color features are an aspect of grotty. The manpage allows an easy check, to see that, basically, the color feature is working on any particular system. By removing this color-markup from the manpage, it is then otherwise quite tedious to discover if grotty is, or is not, working properly.

Also a problem in the groff-base package, and for those interested, who have found their way here, the groff color can be re-enabled by editing the configuration files

 /etc/groff/man.local
 /etc/groff/mdoc.local

and removing or commenting-out the code which disables color, to look instead like:

. \" Debian: Disable the use of SGR (ANSI colour) escape sequences by
. \" grotty.
. \"if '\V[GROFF_SGR]'' \
. \" output x X tty: sgr 0

James

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

FWIW, the commit in question was:

 revno: 335.1.1248
 committer: esr
 timestamp: Mon 2007-02-05 09:41:33 +0000
 message:
   \m[] and \M[] escapes aren't viewer-portable -- which is a shame,
   the effect was cute.

There is no need to edit man.local or mdoc.local; simply export
GROFF_SGR=1 in the environment.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package groff - 1.23.0-2

---------------
groff (1.23.0-2) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Map CW to R for nroff (closes: #1040975).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 14 Jul 2023 17:44:41 +0100