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Re: [Groff] What's missing for Unicode support of groff?
From: |
Jörgen Grahn |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] What's missing for Unicode support of groff? |
Date: |
Thu, 7 Jul 2005 19:53:58 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.9i |
On Thu Jul 7 13:36:36 2005, address@hidden wrote:
> 1) Currently on a Linux system you find man pages in the following encodings:
...
> and none of them contains an encoding marker.
>
> The agreement was to recognize the encoding according to a note in the
> first line
> '\" -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
Who made this agreement? I'm a mere groff user, while you seem to arrive
from a Linux manpage i18n project. Is that the group that reached the
agreement?
> groff will then emit errors when it is fed input that is non-ASCII and
> without coding: marker, so that man page maintainers are notified that
> they need to add the coding: marker.
I'm sure Werner will remind you again if needed, but remember that
- groff isn't just a man page preprocessor.
- groff isn't tied to Linux in particular -- it's rather the other way
around since there are AFAIK no other free troff implementations.
- This kind of change needs to be thought through carefully. Dreaking
existing documents is something that might anger a lot of people.
The user who sees a new groff fail on an old document is not always
in a position to modify it, and the author may not be in a position
to reach all her readers with updated versions.
I think there is a significant distinction between documents and software.
Software tends to be alive, maintained and under update (or you don't use
it). Documents tends to reach a final version, be frozen and released to
the public, with work on them abandoned.
For what it's worth, I tend to use an ASCII input encoding when I write man
pages (writing my name as "J\(:orgen" and so on), but for longer documents
written in Swedish, I simply rely on Latin-1.
BR,
Jörgen
(speaking for myself only, and aiming to be constructive)
--
// Jörgen Grahn "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <address@hidden> -- Jonas