brian m. carlson wrote: > By default, groff converts apostrophes in troff source to Unicode > apostrophes. This is helpful and desirable when being used as a > typesetter, since it makes the output much cleaner and more readable, > but it is a problem in manual pages, since apostrophes are often used > around shell commands and these should remain in their ASCII form for > compatibility with the shell. > > Fortunately, the DocBook stylesheets contain a workaround for this case: > they detect the special .g number register, which is set only when using > groff, and they define a special macro for apostrophes based on whether > or not it is set and use that macro to write out the proper character. > As a result, the DocBook stylesheets handle all cases correctly > automatically, whether the user is using groff or not, unlike our > GNU_ROFF code. > > Additionally, this functionality was implemented in 2010. Since nobody > is shipping security support for an operating system that old anymore, > we can just safely assume that the user has upgraded their system in the > past decade and remove the GNU_ROFF option and its corresponding > stylesheet altogether. I'm not sure of all that, but my machine uses Arch Linux, it ships with groff, I've never used GNU_ROFF=1, and I can copy text with apostrophes from the genrated man pages just fine. So this is probably fine. -- Felipe Contreras
