[bug #62814] [PATCH] consolidate or distinguish tty.tmac and tty-char.tmac

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #12, bug #62814 (group groff):

I replied (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2024-09/msg00082.html) to Branden's
email; the pertinent-to-this-bug portion of the reply (slightly recast to
utilize savannah's markup) is pasted below.
----
> A person who has composed a table entry or any portion of a document
> where filling has off, and employed a special character like \(mo or
> \(*e or \(ca, is likely working from an expectation that whatever gets
> typeset at that place in the text is not going to be wider than, say,
> one em.

A fair point.  But the alternative, on a terminal where tty-char.tmac is _not_
used, is a "special character not defined" warning and these characters
missing from the output altogether.  (None of them are defined in tty.tmac.) 
But yes, omitting those characters from the output does keep them from being
wider than 1 em...

> 2.  a user's preference of whether the "visual" vs. "semantic" fallback
>     character definitions are used.

But that's not the choice the user is presented with.  As comment #0 notes,
"both files contain (disjoint) sets of tty fallback character definitions." 
So the choices are "semantic" fallbacks vs. missing characters.

The sets being disjoint was true when I wrote that in 2022.  It's not strictly
true as of last month's
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c9b3c99a6 commit
c9b3c99a6], which moved a number of alphabetic characters with diacritical
marks from fallbacks.tmac to tty.tmac, giving tty.tmac and tty-char.tmac
slightly different fallback definitions for these characters.  But even this
overlap has little bearing on the points above: both versions of each of these
fallbacks is a net 1 en wide; both versions are defined with the \z escape to
overstrike two characters, just with slightly different characters in each
case.  (If anything, these common elements between the two files should be
removed, and one set of overstruck characters be considered the canonical
terminal fallback.  As bug #62983 points out, whatever terminal you're using
is unlikely to support overstriking anyway.)


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