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Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future


From: Gunnar Ritter
Subject: Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:06:01 +0100
User-agent: Heirloom mailx 12.3pre 01/08/07

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Gunnar seems to think UTF-8 is the right direction.

Yes, with the exception of CJK writers, people all over
the world seem to agree on that, and it is unlikely that
anybody except those will even have the idea to write
text documents like troff input in any other encoding
than UTF-8 in a few years from now. Linux distributions
like SuSE and RedHat default to UTF-8 locales in German
since 2002 or 2003 IIRC.

> > > 1) Trim the groff manual pages so they use only the portable subset,
> > > plus the .SY and .OP macros that Werner and I have characterized.
> > 
> > While I fully support .SY and .OP I wonder whether we need another
> > macro to better separate content from formatting issues.  Gunnar, any
> > suggestions here?
>
> I would also welcome any such suggestions.  Especially from Gunnar,
> but from anyone else as well.

As I wrote before, I would propose to start with the POSIX
utility argument syntax to arrive at a macro set that fully
supports that at least. Then I would continue with an
evaluation of argument syntax outside POSIX: GNU long options,
X long options, optional option-arguments, etc.

I will not do that myself or write these macros, though,
since my need for them is absolutely zero.

All I want is to avoid an incomplete hack extension to -man
which seems useful just for this discussion but does not
result in a general improvement.

        Gunnar




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