groff problems
Hi,
It is reported by a few people that Debian's groff cannot handle
some non-Latin1/Japanese languages such as Russian, Polish, and
Korean.
# Bug#71744 for Russian and Bug#66928 for Polish are reported.
# http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n-0007-msg00023.html is a
# report by Peter Novodvorsky.
This is due to Japanese patch, which reads continuing two >0x80
characters as one EUC (nearly equal to multibyte) character. Thus,
two continuing Polish 8-bit characters cannot be displayed. Since
all Cyrillic alphabets in Russian KOI8-R encoding are >0x80, only
the last character of words containing odd number of characters is
displayed. Though I don't confirm Korean problem, I hope someone
will follow.
Some members including me (and a FreeBSD person) have discussed
about this problem personally. Hereafter I would like to discuss
here. (Discussions were started at a few places independently.
We should unite these discussions. And more, we can read the
discussion via web.)
--- * --- * ---
I think that the original design of groff is very confused and
wrongly localized to Latin-1. Thus, to solve this problem,
we need radical re-designing and re-implementation of groff.
However, we need to fix the bugs ASAP. And more, an ad-hoc
fix is already suggested. Thus, I would like to discuss this
problem in two ways; one is about the 'ideal implementation',
and the another is about 'ad-hoc fix'. Thus I will write two
follow messages against this message.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
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