Re: [BUG] "\fC" macro in ox-man.el [9.6.15 (release_9.6.15 @ /usr/share/emacs/29.2/lisp/org/)]

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com> writes:

> (This was first reported to Emacs at
> https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=69483)
>
> "mu4e"[1] (a popular Emacs mail client) uses Org to generate its
> manpages.  However, the generated output contains macros that are not
> understood by groff.  After some debugging, Jeremy traced this back to
> the macro "\fC" used in ox-man.el[2].  Git history shows that this may
> have been there since the beginning.  We tried to find a documentation
> for the "\fC" macro but has not been able to find one.  Jeremy suggests
> that "C" may be an old alias for Courier, and if that's the case it
> should be changed to "\f[CR]".  Would be great if Org people can
> confirm.

This is not an unknown problem. AFAIU, the \fC macro is widely used for
troff, although it is not supported by groff. Check out the ongoing
discussion at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1049968#15

They suggest the following instead of \fC:

   The best solution known to me is to use an extension to the man(7)
   language.  It first appeared in Ninth Edition Unix (1986) and was
   adopted by a groff release in 2009.  That is the `EX`/`EE` macro pair,
   which sets a monospaced display.  (In other words, filling is disabled
   and a monospaced font selected if necessary.)

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
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