Re: manpage character cleanup for UTF-8 compatibility
On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 10:44:33PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 09:03:31PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > One other thought has occurred to me while working on fixing certain
> > parts of man-db's locale support. Sooner or later, when groff 2 is
> > released (but not beforehand!), we're going to have to move towards
> > having all man pages encoded in UTF-8. For most languages this probably
> > isn't too bad: you just use de_DE.UTF-8 rather than de, or whatever
> > (although I'm not sure how that'd work for languages with multiple
> > regional variants). It's going to be a royal pain for English, though,
> > because currently we just put things directly in /usr/share/man, meaning
> > the C locale, and there's no C.UTF-8, probably for good reasons.
> > en_US.UTF-8 would be a poor choice because we also need en_GB.UTF-8 and
> > so on.
>
> AIUI, only ASCII is valid in the C locale anyway. Setting the top bit
> is an error.
True enough, and the FHS says:
For example, systems which only have English manual pages coded with
ASCII, may store manual pages (the man<section> directories) directly in
/usr/share/man. (That is the traditional circumstance and arrangement,
in fact.)
It's sometimes a pain to be quite that strict, though (e.g. authors'
names), so I wouldn't object to people using ISO-8859-1 accents like
\('e in /usr/share/man/man*, just as long as they're coded thus rather
than in raw ISO-8859-1.
It doesn't seem to be all that prevalent anyway. A quick script [1]
checking just /usr/share/man/man1 on my system only shows 28 out of
1697, and at least one of those is a false positive due to some
non-ASCII characters that are only in comments:
/usr/share/man/man1/esd-config.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ethereal.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/filterm.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/flipdiff.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/font2psf.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/grolbp.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/html2text.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ispell-wrapper.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/konwert.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/magic2mime.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/mini-dinstall.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/mmroff.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/mp4h.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/pbmtonokia.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlcn.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlebcdic.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlhack.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlhist.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perljp.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlko.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlothrtut.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perlthrtut.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perltw.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ppmshadow.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ptx.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/thumbpdf.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/unicode.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/unwrapdiff.1.gz
[1] find /usr/share/man/man1 -type f | while read x; do zcat "$x" | \
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t US-ASCII >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo "$x"; done
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: