groff 1.23.0 added .MR to its -man macro package. The NEWS file states
that the inclusion of the macro "was prompted by its introduction to
Plan 9 from User Space's troff in August 2020." From d32deab it seems
that the name for Plan 9 from User Space's implementation was suggested
by groff maintainer G. Brandon Robinson.
Not sure if the intention was to make these definitions compatible, but
it would be nice if they were.
Currently, Plan 9 from User Space's .MR expects its second argument to
be parenthesized. groff's .MR does not. This results in extra
parentheses appearing in manual references when viewing Plan 9 from User
Space's manual pages on a system using groff.
The overloading of IR emits magic \X'...' sequences that turn into HTML manual links.
But not all such IR invocations should be manual links;
those had to be written to avoid the IR macro before.
Worse, the \X'...' ending the IR causes troff to emit only a single space after a period.
Defining a new IM macro for manual references fixes both problems.
Fixes#441.
This fixes at least one shell script (printfont) that expected
'x'`{y}'z'
to mean
'x'^`{y}^'z'
as it now does. Before it meant:
'x'^`{y} 'z'
One surprise is that adjacent lists get a free carat:
(x y z)(1 2 3)
is
(x1 y2 z3)
This doesn't affect any rc script in Plan 9 or plan9port.
