nroff char '0255' bug?

[H.J. Thomassen]

Hello Werner,

We just converted to groff version 1.18, and seem to have hit a small bug
in the nroff-formatter. Maybe I overlooked a detail, but please have a
look with me. It is extremely simple to demonstrate in a Latin1 environment:

My input file contains four bytes only:
character 'a', character with byte-code 0xAD, character 'b', newline.

The byte-code 0xAD is octal 255, and in Latin1 encoding it represents
a kind of hyphen character. A very easy way to create such a file is
to catch the output of:       echo axb | tr 'x' '\255'
A full demo is easy as well:  echo axb | tr 'x' '\255' | nroff | more
or:                           echo axb | tr 'x' '\255' | nroff | od -c

The output of nroff (1.18) for this input-data shows the 'a' and the 'b',
but nothing in between. Previous nroff-versions such as 1.16.1 showed a
proper hyphen between the 'a' and the 'b'.

If you change the '255' into '254' or '256' you will see that these
surrounding Latin1 characters do show up properly; the problem seems to
be limited to the '255' (octal) value only.

The problem occurs with and without the -Tlatin1 flag. I also tried
various settings of the LANG shell variable and they seem to have no
influence either,

Regards,
-- 
Hendrik-Jan Thomassen
<address@hidden> http://www.ATComputing.nl/images/pasfotos/hjt.jpg
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