No. It has things that aren't bullet points, and besidelines. Underlines go underneath, and asterisks are not bullet points.
In its UTF-8 mode, for bullet points GNU groff uses the actual Unicode characters that are available. Until 2024, in "ascii" mode it overstruck a plus symbol with a letter 'o', one of many such typewriting tricks, which no-one but those printing manual pages to old printers capable of the same typewriting trick would have ever seen as it was supposed to be seen. On VDUs, such bullet points just came out as the letter 'o'.
Sadly, in 2024 its developers did away with this interesting little-known quirky feature that almost no-one would have seen properly rendered. (-:
Interestingly, I couldn't find a Unicode code point that satisfactorily represented the crossed circle that this would have been on paper. There's a mathematical operator that is not semantically correct.
I wonder whether, given the reams of books on Linux-based operating system administration and use, any author or publisher typesetting yet another copy of the manual pages got grotty's overstruck plus-o into print.
Because that would be one rather ironic argument for getting it an assigned Unicode code point.
I suspect that all the books were better typeset than that, though.
I agree with almost everything in your comment except the initial ”no”, which seems to indicate you misunderstood the comment you were replying to.
Things like `enscript` and `a2ps` can render ASCII overstrikes without the need for old printers. (PostScript and PDF have no trouble representing overstrikes!) Also xterm in Tek4014 mode, but that's a lot less useful.
The output mode of groff that overstrikes also depends on fixed-pitch fonts for proper alignment, which puts strict limits on the quality of the resulting typesetting. You could imagine alternatives that didn't (for example, allocate a character cell the maximum of the advance width of both characters and center them both in it), but groff didn't implement them.
You mis-used the word "write". Not that it makes much sense to say that Markdown "writes" anything, and the best guess for what is meant when it is said that a markup language "writes" something is that it includes something as markup when one writes in that language, which in this case it definitely does not.
a2ps isn't writing ASCII and overstrikes, either. Obviously so, as its output is PostScript. It's reading ASCII and overstrikes, like pg, most, less, more, and even the humble ul command; and writing something else entirely. Reading stuff that was destined for old typewriter-like printers and turning it into something else is straying quite far from what strogonoff and I were actually talking about. That's a whole other discussion, and how bad less and more (and indeed a2ps) are at reading such stuff, even compared to what ul is capable of, is a lengthy discussion in itself.
Note that I did explicitly point to the part of groff that is used where it is the "tty" output post-processing, i.e. grotty, which handles what are called in the groff doco the "typewriter-like devices". PostScript and PDF and non-fixed-width fonts are the domain of grops and gropdf et al. and again not the typewriters that we were talking about.
In the context of GNU groff, it is what is written to those "typewriter-like devices" that is what is relevant to typewriters, in that groff (grotty) uses the same idea for the same effect, relies upon the same assumptions about glyph shapes not being crazily different from the norm (which turns out to be a fairly shaky assumption for the middle to late 20th century), and can (as typewriters with a few judicious glyph designs for things like single quotes and such could) actually construct a fairly decent subset of Latin-1 and some other bits and bobs using this technique from the typewriter days.
> in "ascii" mode it overstruck a plus symbol with a letter 'o', one of many such typewriting tricks, which no-one but those printing manual pages to old printers capable of the same typewriting trick would have ever seen
I was pointing out that you don't need an old printer to see them; `enscript` and `a2ps` are perfectly capable of showing them to you. So it is not the case that, as you said,
> Reading stuff that was destined for old typewriter-like printers (...) is straying (...) far from what strogonoff and I were (...) talking about.
The rest of your comment seems to be you getting mad that you found my comments hard to interpret sensibly.
