Re: [Groff] use of HTML4 characters

[Werner LEMBERG]

> While converting all man pages on a Linux installation to HTML,
> there were very many "can't find special character" warnings, and
> the resulting characters were indeed missing from the output.

Yes, this is something which hasn't fixed yet, unfortunately.

> On the other hand, important browsers like Netscape 4.7x still don't
> know about these characters and represent \(bu as "•" and \- as
> "−".  Therefore I think it's best to support two different
> variants of the HTML device for the moment: "html" as HTML 3.2, and
> "html4" as HTML 4.0. Let the users (or distributors) choose the
> right one for their environment.

Thanks for the patch, but I don't accept a new `html4' device.  It's
bad enough that we already have four different tty devices (and people
were asing for koi8-r and latin-2, and latin-14, etc.).

Selecting a different character set (resp. glyph repertoire) has to be
done at the macro level.  Something like

  groff -Thtml -dlevel=3.2 ...

(where the default will be HTML 4.0).

Since I want to do the 1.17 release in a few days, adding support for
HTML 4.0 will be postponed for the 1.17.1 (or 2.0) release.


    Werner