Add support for "char^Hchar" and "_^Hchar"

[phmarek]

Eg. MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING=1 man man returns sequences like char^Hchar (which should be bold) and _^Hchar (which should be underlined).

Example:

S^HSY^HYN^HNO^HOP^HPS^HSI^HIS^HS
    m^Hma^Han^Hn  [-^H-C^HC  _^Hf_^Hi_^Hl_^He] ...

SYNOPSIS would be bold, and file underlined.

It would be great if AnsiEsc would support these.

Thanks a lot!

[powerman]

What's for? No, really, what's your use case and how AnsiEsc is related to this? These are not "ansi escape sequences", AFAIK. Also, if you unintentionally get such output you can strip these "backspaces" by filtering through col -b. I think best you can do - find/develop converter from such backspaces to normal ansi escape sequences and use it before sending output to Vim.

[HaleTom]

I have the same use case: using vim as a pager for viewing manual pages. It supports folds. It's far more powerful than less.

Here is a vi.stackexchange question which describes the problem in greater detail.

Keeping these sequences is intentional; they are formatting directives being sent by nroff's rendering of a man-page: Bold (overstrike with same letter) and italics (represented by underline, _ overstruck by the underlined letter).

Ideally they both directives could be converted into a highlight region so that the user could select how they wanted both styles to be displayed in vim (underline for italics is generally considered ugly).

The issue with the plugins that view man pages in vim is that the do strip these codes, causing information loss - different highlighting of important parts of text that cannot be regenerated by regex alone.