A few days ago, a patch from <G dot Branden dot Robinson at gmail dot com>

got committed to groff which changed .TP from using .it to using .itc,
such that groff now supports more than one man(7) macro line in the .TP
head if all but the last line in the head end with \c.

Of course, relying on that behaviour is utterly non-portable, but if
authors are reckless enough to use that idiom, let's do what they want.

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/man.c b/man.c
index 9c26e4e7..228f3afc 100644
--- a/man.c
+++ b/man.c
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
-/*	$Id: man.c,v 1.170 2017/04/29 12:45:41 schwarze Exp $ */
+/*	$Id: man.c,v 1.171 2017/05/01 23:27:39 schwarze Exp $ */
 /*
  * Copyright (c) 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>
- * Copyright (c) 2013, 2014, 2015 Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
+ * Copyright (c) 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017 Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
  * Copyright (c) 2011 Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@netbsd.org>
  *
  * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
@@ -201,6 +201,20 @@ man_pmacro(struct roff_man *man, int ln, char *buf, int offs)
 	man_breakscope(man, tok);
 	bline = man->flags & MAN_BLINE;
 
+	/*
+	 * If the line in next-line scope ends with \c, keep the
+	 * next-line scope open for the subsequent input line.
+	 * That is not at all portable, only groff >= 1.22.4
+	 * does it, but *if* this weird idiom occurs in a manual
+	 * page, that's very likely what the author intended.
+	 */
+
+	if (bline) {
+		cp = strchr(buf + offs, '\0') - 2;
+		if (cp >= buf && cp[0] == '\\' && cp[1] == 'c')
+			bline = 0;
+	}
+
 	/* Call to handler... */
 
 	assert(man_macros[tok].fp);