Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Ralph,

thanks for your feedback!

Ralph Corderoy wrote on Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 11:33:09AM +0100:
> Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>>  * The playing card symbols are maybe not top priority, but mandoc
>>    has them and its obvious enough what to print, so why not.
>> +.tty-char \[CL] <club>
>> +.tty-char \[SP] <spade>
>> +.tty-char \[HE] <heart>
>> +.tty-char \[DI] <diamond>

> In the context of playing cards, single capital letters are used, `KC'
> is king of clubs, `4D' is four of diamonds.  If listing a hand using
> `\(CL', etc., it should be approximated using single letters, not the
> noisy `<club>', over and over.

I used that suggestion in the commit; it seems you are right, these
symbols are quite unlikely to be used when the context is unclear.

>>  * The rendering of Pound Sterling seems really bad to me.
>>    Nowadays, seeing a capital L, people will hardly think of the
>>    French word "Livre" and then understand "Pound Sterling".
>> -.tty-char \[Po] \z-L
>> +.tty-char \[Po] GBP

> No, an English speaker, i.e. British, would think of `L. s. d', `pounds,
> shillings, and pence'.  The letters coming from librae, solidi, and
> denarii.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
> `\z-L' is correct here, and used on old typewriters too.  Please don't
> change it.

I see, i removed that change from the patch before comitting.
I will change it in mandoc instead, to match groff.

>>    We don't render the Euro sign as \z=C either...

> Because it's a recent invention and someone just copied the ISO 4127.
> Given Pound, `$', and Yen, are in ASCII `L', `$', and `Y', I think `E'
> should be the approximation.  That's the rendering for epsilon, which is
> the inspiration for the Euro symbol;  a nod to the Greeks, the `cradle
> of Europe'.  (The two horizontal lines reinforce the `stability' of the
> currency, apparently.)  And again, `E' gives a conformant single column
> when mixing currencies.  I seen it used for this reason elsewhere.

Not sure about that one.  I wouldn't understand 'E' to mean "Euro",
and i guess that many other continental Europeans wouldn't either.
Anyway, changing this wasn't part of the proposed patch in the first
place.  :-)

>>    (I think \z=Y for Yen is OK, Y is at least the right letter.)

> And `Y' over `=' the common typewriter representation.

>>    So let's do the same for GBP as for EUR.

> No, please don't.  It's been a single character and changing that breaks
> layout and again looks ugly when there's lots of them.

Thanks for having a look, the uncontroversial parts are in,
the playing card suits with your tweak.

Yours,
  Ingo