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


From: John Gardner
Subject: Re: [groff] Regularize (sub)section cross references.
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2018 11:06:56 +1100

Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle, but...

I don't really see what the problem is. Documentation offers readers one
language at a time. Sure, multilingual authors might split each page into,
say, English or French. But unless it's crippling lack of Unicode/UTF-8
support which stops Groff from embracing the UCS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set> in both its
syntax and output, then I fail to see why we're even considering
locale-specific anything....

Pretty sure I'm missing something here, though (as usual)

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 10:52, G. Branden Robinson <
address@hidden> wrote:

> At 2018-12-17T23:45:06+0100, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> >
> > > > I think it would be better to extend groff to expose the
> > > > underlying locale-aware C case-transformation functions,
> > > > and _not_ try maintaining our own mappings.
> >
> > > Indeed.  I don't think maintaining our own mappings is viable.
> > > It just won't work, there are too many characters in Unicode.
> >
> > I'm against this whole locale thing.  It needlessly complicates
> > groff and will probably fail when reading foreign manual pages
> > in a "C" locale.
>
> That's _already_ a big fail, depending on the language.
>
> > I'd rather have the authors of foreign language manual pages simply
> > add the conversion string for that language at the top of the document
> > source.
>
> That's pretty wasteful.  And unnecessary, I would think--as Werner
> pointed out, these conversion strings could be added to the
> language-specific macro packages groff already provides[1].  I don't
> know if the man program has to do any work to ensure they're loaded, but
> that would again be a better place to do so.
>
> Your proposal would also put more low-level requests into man page
> sources, which Ingo and I (and everyone else who cares about anything
> approaching semantic parseability of man pages) are trying to get _rid_
> of.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1] $ ls -1 tmac/[a-z][a-z].tmac
> tmac/an.tmac
> tmac/cs.tmac
> tmac/de.tmac
> tmac/ec.tmac
> tmac/fr.tmac
> tmac/ja.tmac
> tmac/me.tmac
> tmac/ms.tmac
> tmac/ps.tmac
> tmac/sv.tmac
> tmac/zh.tmac
>


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