Should handle .fR .fI .fB font changes

[Paul Sladen]

Manpages include the tags .fI .fR .fB which change the font/face as required.

Currently all text appears in the same typeface, which looses emphasis information.

Ideally, bold, italic and roman (normal) font formatting changes should be handled in HTML in they same way that they are marked up.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Thanks for the report, confirmed. That would be nice.

Ideally, that would be handled by w3mman.

:-Dustin

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Colin, any ideas? I seem to remember you knowing more about w3mman than I :-)

:-Dustin

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Paul-

Can you give an example of a specific page (I know there are thousands) where this occurs? Such that I could use it as a test basis?

Thanks,
:-Dustin

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This is probably because man filters out formatting characters when it's writing to a pipe, since normally that interferes with all sorts of things (e.g. grep); but w3m expects the formatting characters so that it can do something useful with them. You can set MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING=1 in the environment to avoid this behaviour. IMO w3mman should do this by default; I'm opening a bug task for that.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Example: just about anything. I used man(1).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package w3m - 0.5.2-2ubuntu1

---------------
w3m (0.5.2-2ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/10-w3mman-keep-formatting: Set MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING=1 to
    instruct man to preserve formatting characters in its output rather than
    filtering them through col (closes: #325699, #426362; LP: #283975,
    #353900).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:49:15 +0100

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Fixed in revno: 157. Not yet on production site.