At 2021-08-01T12:38:36+0200, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:

What are "font escapes" and "italic correction escapes"?  I don't know
those technical terms.

\f introduces a font escape sequence, which changes the font being used
to set the text.  They go way back to 1970s AT&T troff.

Italic correction escapes are a groff innovation for a typographical
concept of ancient vintage.  They are spelled "\," and "\/" (these are
the sorts of names you come up with when you run out of room in a
one-character name space that has to be input from an ASCII keyboard).

All are documented in groff(7)[1].  The italic correction escapes are
discussed at greater length in groff_diff(7)[2] since they would be new
to AT&T troff veterans.

Ahh, I used mgroff(1) (mental groff).  I should debug my mental
parser.

So, as I suspected, that .IP is ignored, if my mental groff is working
correctly now.

Well...it's not _ignored_, it's a macro--it gets interpolated and
interpreted.  It just, in this case, doesn't do much if anything that
isn't redundant.

Since almost when I started here, I'm trying to have the man-pages be
consistent across all of the pages, both in terms of source code and
rendered output.  Not an easy thing...

I hope that when I finish this (if it can ever be finished), reading
and writing man-pages is a simpler task for newbies :)

I have similar goals.  It's a pleasure to work with you.  :D

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/groff.7.html
[2] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/groff_diff.7.html