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Re: UTF-8 man pages



David Given <dg@cowlark.com> writes:

> I'm trying to package a simple tool that wants a Japanese string in its man
> page. It would appear that currently, man pages use fixed encodings that vary
> depending on which locale's man page is being looked up; English uses
> ISO-8859-1, so it's not possible to use kanji in one.
>
> Various people on -mentors suggested that this was wrong as there was a plan
> in place to convert to using UTF-8 throughout, and that I should bring this up
> here; I can't find any references to such a plan on the 'net --- is there one?
> What's its status? And what should I do to get my man page working?

Unless things have changed recently, groff is still fixed to using
8-bit encodings.  Until it can actually process UTF-8 input, using
UTF-8 encoding would (IMO) create more problems than it solves.

I would personally like to see this happen, but until it does we are
limited (I believe) to the glyphs described in groff_char(7).  I am
not aware of any Japanese support at all except in specially-patched
versions.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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