[Python-Dev] Re: More pydoc questions

[François Pinard]

[Greg Ewing]

> David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>:

> > N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE
> >    docstring_ext

> That looks like it's designed to produce bold characters
> on a mechanical-impact printing device. Which is surely
> an anachronism in this day and age -- it's not going to
> work on most of the printers in use nowadays, is it?

It works pretty well, as many printer filters know how to interpret such
overstrike when meant to bold or underline.  Some of these filters even
know how to combine diacritics over/under letters.  For glass screens,
`less' also does the proper thing.

A few years ago, I had to write a tool that should underline and bold, and
after some looking around, found out that using overstrike was the most
versatile and supported way to proceed, however anachronic it may look.
Of course, we could resort to bigger hammers, like Docbook or XML, and
converters of all sorts, but there is also a place for simple things! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard