Re: [Groff] Re: groff: radical re-implementation

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > What mechanism do you suggest for communication between the
> > preprocessor and troff?
> 
> Well, I thought again and conclude that the current version of Groff
> cannot cooperate well with the preprocessor.  If we want
> locale-sensibility before the re-implementation of troff, I suggest
> that groff wrapper is suitable for such an implementation.  I think
> this is not so big evil.

Hmm.  What about the following temporary solution:

  Run the preprocessor twice; the first time it is called directly by
  the groff program, and it returns an error code which groff can use
  to set the -T switch.  The proprocessor shouldn't do any processing
  except checking the locale setting and testing the first line(s) of
  the input file for an `encoding' directive'.

  The second time just do the normal pipeline.

Such an algorithm can be implemented with just a few lines of code, I
think.

> However, I think the best 'makeshift' will be that troff will
> support UTF-8 I/O without drastic change of internal of troff.  I
> don't know this can be acheved with minor modification of troff or
> not, since I am not familiar with the internal of troff.

There are a lot of things to change, test, and check until 32bit input
characters are accepted...


    Werner