Re: manpage character cleanup for UTF-8 compatibility
On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 07:50:44PM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> * Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> [20030325 18:50 PST]:
> > On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 04:01:51PM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > > Most of these things don't make any difference in ASCII locales, but
> > > break in UTF-8 locales in which the special characters are actually
> > > rendered specially. For example, searching for a particular
> > > command-line option is unncessarily difficult if it is incorrectly
> > > specified with a hyphen instead of a minus sign.
> >
> > The last time this came up in detail on the upstream groff mailing list,
> > it was pointed out that Unicode-capable pagers really ought to start
> > regarding different types of spaces and dashes as similar for searching
> > purposes. I've not seen much evidence of this yet, but I think this
> > would be a good time for such support to start happening.
>
> Right. That would help usability in the short term, but it feels more
> like a workaround than a fix.
It actually feels like a real improvement to me: you don't want to have
to specify the kind of space you want when searching, for example,
especially since they mostly look the same.
> It still doesn't solve the copy-and-paste problem, either. Having the
> pagers change what they display when given the proper multibyte
> characters would really a step backwards.
No, indeed, I agree that copying and pasting is a different matter from
searching.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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