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[bug #51362] [PATCH]: Add a synonym for the font "CW"

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Follow-up Comment #5, bug #51362 (project groff):


[comment #4 comment #4:]
> The bad practice of requesting \f(CW or .ft CW in man(7) pages is widespread
enough that mandoc(1) has been supporting it for backward compatibility for
many years.  In practice, \f(CW is clearly used more often than the more
logical \f(CR (which mandoc also supports, but nor for such a long time). 
That said, your point seems fair to me that there is nothing wrong with
warning authors about this particular kind of bad practice.
> 
> Support for \f[C] is clearly not needed.  I don't recall encountering that
in a manual page at all, ever.

My suspicion is that this was an ms-ism that got picked up by man page
writers, because ms has had a .CW macro for as far back as I'm aware (though I
haven't done a history of it the way I did for man(7)).  I guess at some point
the typesetters at Bell Labs had a Courier-ish font but only roman styling for
it.

If I'm right, this led to an unfortunate failing of imagination.

For documents targeting -Tdvi it's a little more understandable because TeX
long had its own font universe, and CW and CWI were their (only?) choices for
something monospaced.

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[bug #51362] [PATCH]: Add a synonym for the font "CW" "G. Branden Robinson" <INVALID.NOREPLY@gnu.org> - 2020-08-06 11:11 -0400

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