Re: [Groff] Re: unicode support, part 14: unicode fonts

[Keith MARSHALL]

Werner Lemberg wrote, quoting Bruno Haible:
>> With this patch, an average Japanese manual page can be processed,
>> but shows the following problems:
>>
>>   1) Although the man page starts with
>>
>> '\" t -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>
>>      the groff driver is not intelligent enough to run preconv. I
>>      have to activate the -k option explicitly.
>
> This is a feature.  I think it is best to not change this -- at
> least not now.

Maybe this is something that man, rather than groff, should do?

Man already reads the first line of the man page, to check for the
'\" t, etc. tag; this tells it which preprocessors to include in its
command pipeline.  I don't think it would be too difficult to have it
also check for the coding tag, and add the -k option to the nroff
options when required, (subject to a configure check, to ensure
that it's supported by the selected groff binary).

BTW, man-1.6 has

  JNROFF  /path/to/groff -Tnippon -mandocj ...

in its man.conf.  I haven't yet delved into the code enough to
understand what makes man select the JNROFF formatter over NROFF, but
I guess it's related in some way to the Debian Japanese patch, which
(hopefully) can go away, after Bruno's Unicode support is completed.

Regards,
Keith.