Re: [groff] Regularize (sub)section cross references.

[John Gardner]

> The biggest problem I know of is that the uppercasing transform of
> German sharp S "ß" goes to "SS"

Pretty damn sure that's nothing compared to the Turkish dotless I
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I#In_computing>.

Then again, I'm sure they're used to seeing computers screw up the tittle
by now... :-)

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 04:04, G. Branden Robinson <
address@hidden> wrote:

> At 2018-12-17T08:28:07+0100, Pierre-Jean Fichet wrote:
> >
> > Hello alls,
> >
> > "G. Branden Robinson" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > +.ie \\$1 .tr aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ
> > > +.el      .tr aabbccddeeffgghhiijjkkllmmnnooppqqrrssttuuvvwwxxyyzz
> >
> > The problem with this, is that it ignores all but english languages.
>
> Yup.  I'm aware of that, which is why I did not propose it as an
> actual patch.  It's just a proof of concept, and it does work, as far as
> it goes--which is not far enough for non-English languages or the rare
> occasions when English words avail themselves of diacritics.
>
> Examples: résumé, fiancé, naïve, coöperation, reëntrant, ... [1]
>
> > "élément", for instance, would become "éLéMENT", which is the ugliest
> > thing you can get. And yes, there are man pages in french, and I
> > believe, in a lot of other languages.
>
> I'm aware.
>
> The biggest problem I know of is that the uppercasing transform of
> German sharp S "ß" goes to "SS".  (A recent version of Unicode did
> introduce a capital sharp S but it might have only specialized uses; I'm
> not sure all Germans would find it acceptable.)
>
> A 1-to-2 character mapping of course is beyond the ability of .tr.
>
> As I think John Gardner said, what we really need is a roff request to
> expose the underlying C library's toupper() and tolower() functions.
>
> A good feature to precede this one into 1.22.5, perhaps?
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1] All of these can be spelled without diacritics, but it is also
> acceptable according to most style manuals I've seen to preserve them,
> especially when they help to disambiguate pronunciation.  The magazine
> _New Yorker_ is somewhat notorious for clinging to the dieresis as a
> signifier that a vowel cluster should not be pronounced as a diphthong.
>