Re: [Groff] What's missing for Unicode support of groff?

[Jörgen Grahn]

On Thu Jul  7 13:36:36 2005, address@hidden wrote:
> 1) Currently on a Linux system you find man pages in the following encodings:
...
>    and none of them contains an encoding marker.
> 
>    The agreement was to recognize the encoding according to a note in the
>    first line
>            '\" -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-

Who made this agreement?  I'm a mere groff user, while you seem to arrive
from a Linux manpage i18n project. Is that the group that reached the
agreement?

>    groff will then emit errors when it is fed input that is non-ASCII and
>    without coding: marker, so that man page maintainers are notified that
>    they need to add the coding: marker.

I'm sure Werner will remind you again if needed, but remember that

- groff isn't just a man page preprocessor.

- groff isn't tied to Linux in particular -- it's rather the other way
  around since there are AFAIK no other free troff implementations.

- This kind of change needs to be thought through carefully. Dreaking
  existing documents is something that might anger a lot of people.
  The user who sees a new groff fail on an old document is not always
  in a position to modify it, and the author may not be in a position
  to reach all her readers with updated versions.

  I think there is a significant distinction between documents and software.
  Software tends to be alive, maintained and under update (or you don't use
  it). Documents tends to reach a final version, be frozen and released to
  the public, with work on them abandoned.

For what it's worth, I tend to use an ASCII input encoding when I write man
pages (writing my name as "J\(:orgen" and so on), but for longer documents
written in Swedish, I simply rely on Latin-1.

BR,
Jörgen
(speaking for myself only, and aiming to be constructive)

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <address@hidden>                                   -- Jonas