Re: groff (non-ISO8859-1 manpages)
From: David Frey <david@eos.lugs.ch>
Subject: Re: groff (non-ISO8859-1 manpages)
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 22:28:11 +0200
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 09:35:05AM +0100, Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
> > What I want to say is that English manpages should be written in
> > ASCII (not ISO-8859-1) because people all over the world may want
> > to read English manpages.
> > There are many codesets which are
> > incompatible to (i.e. inconvertible from) ISO-8859-1. Fortunately,
> > ASCII is compatible to all codesets in the world.
>
> I'm probably nit-picking: Manpages are written in the troff
> typesetting language which is plain ASCII. What we are discussing is the
> output device supplied to troff (-Tnippon, -Tlatin1, -Tascii, -Tps, ...).
> This depends on User's preference and the console technologies involved
> (VT100, Linux console, xterm, xman, Display PostScript, printer,...).
My need is that English manpages should not be misleading if they
are typesetted using -Tascii. For that purpose, the source should
be written in ASCII. And more, manpage writers have to be careful
if they want to use troff typesetting language such as '\(co'
(coprgith mark) and '\(:u' (u with umlaut) so that the manpage is
not misleading with '-Tascii'. Then I can rewrite man-db to use
'-Tascii' or '-Tascii8' for English manpages for non-ISO-8859-1 users.
# '-Tascii8' is a new device which I am trying to implement to groff,
# which is 8bit-clean and don't use ISO-8859-1 characters which are
# not written in the man source. Now no adequate device is available
# for charsets other than ASCII, ISO-8859-1, and EUC-JP.
However, Edmund said in this list that
> If there is a
> man page that needs ISO-8859-1, then it's probably a man page which
> discusses diacritics, e.g. a man page about using groff or TeX.
Such a usage of ISO-8859-1 character perhaps causes misleading if
the page is typesetted using -Tascii.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.or.jp>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to i18n" - Debian Documentation Project
Reply to: