It's not just conceivable. It's how the output of grotty in TTY-37 mode works to this day. When you are reading a manual with underlining and boldface, and yo

It's not just conceivable. It's how the output of grotty in TTY-37 mode works to this day. When you are reading a manual with underlining and boldface, and you haven't brought your manual system into the bold new GNU world of the 1990s where it actually uses ECMA-48 instead of TTY-37, the tty output driver is using carriage returns and backspaces to enact overstrikes. * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html I wrote a better manual page for ul(1) that explains some of this. ul is basically a TTY-37 to your-terminal-type converter, and it implements a lot of the effects that one would see on a real teletype. Unfortunately, the old manual hasn't progressed much beyond the original 1970s one and doesn't explain a lot of the functionality that the program actually has. * http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/ul.1 http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/ul.1