I've mentioned this issue in passing already in #910 but to make the point more clearly again:

\a....\a is used to provide "emphasized or italized" text in getopt-provided "manpages". while, indeed, "italized" is what one gets when doing (using getopts own help as example):

getopts --nroff 2>&1 | groff -Tpdf -man - > getopts_manpage.pdf

i.e. in the printer ready version and

underlined text for all \a....\a enclosed source text in the terminal with

getopts --nroff 2>&1 | nroff -man

with

getopts --man

one gets bold underline for such text -- and these is really undesirable in my view. the documenation also states that \b.....\b enclosed text should be "emboldened" so "emphasis" is very probably not intended to just mean "bold font". in any case, output currently just looks a bit awkward: \b....\b is bold (as it should be) but \a...\a is also bold plus underlined. especially when the terminal emulator is configured such that it translates bold to some colour the output currently is really "busy".

just compare the output of getopts --man and dsp --man 2>&1|awk '{gsub(/1;4m/, "4m");print}' to see what I mean... :).

and while getopts --man is clearly intended to closely mimic man(1) output, the latter indeed does (sensibly) use only underline for stuff like command arguments and I think \a....\a should follow suit in the --man output. or am I mistaken?