Re: Doubts about a typo fix

[G. Branden Robinson]

[dropping Paul, Alex, and tz@iana]

At 2022-11-26T22:20:23+0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> It would be great if groff would release adjustments to grotty so
> that one could again use copy+paste also in manuals.

One can.

> And now please do not beat me onto that hyphen-minus for options, and
> that one should do this or that, but it is for many other characters,
> too.  If i look at bash manual for example, hyphen-minus is ok, but
> caret is not ^ but U+02C6 MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT, and i see
> U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK instead of single-quotes.

Those mean ^ was typed when \(ha was meant, and ` was typed when \(ga
was meant.

> That is cool and maybe milks the shit out of the typographic
> capabilities of modern UTF-8 terminal emulators (i think i quote you
> here, more or less),

I don't think so.  When I milk something I emphatically do not
anticipate the production of excrement from the orifice.

I try to keep my cruder wise cracks off of mailing lists.

> but i always have to use "LC_ALL=C man XY" to enable copy+paste for
> myself.

That's not necessary.  You can employ the workaround documented in the
PROBLEMS file, as I believe I have told you before.

---snip---
* When viewing man pages, some characters on my UTF-8 terminal emulator
  look funny or copy-and-paste wrong.  Why?

Some Unicode Basic Latin ("ASCII") input characters are mapped to
non-Basic Latin code points in output for consistency with other output
devices, like PDF.  See groff_man_style(7) and groff_char(7) for correct
input conventions and background.  If you use the correct groff special
character escape sequences to input them, you will get correct output no
matter what device the input is formatted for.

However, many man pages are written in ignorance of the correct special
characters to obtain the desired glyphs.  You can conceal these errors
by adding the following to your site-local man(7) configuration.  The
file is called "man.local"; its installation directory depends on how
groff was configured when it was built.

--- start ---
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
.  char ' \[aq]
.  char - \-
.  char ^ \[ha]
.  char ` \[ga]
.  char ~ \[ti]
.\}
--- end ---

You may also wish to do the same for "mdoc.local".
---snip---

You can edit one file (or two, if you care about mdoc(7) pages), one
time, and never have to worry about typing LC_ALL=C before your man
commands again.

> But hey, it is only me, i am not a prof at an University who is prowd
> of dozens of Noble price winners and other such prices, many of them
> still worth something aka based upon scientific grounds.

I don't know who you're aiming at with this status-oriented gripe, but
it doesn't sound like me.  I am relatively unlettered person,
academically (can't you tell?).  I enjoy university classes but I'm not
good at being graded.  😅

Regards,
Branden

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