To: deb18n Cc: TP list On 12/11/2006, at 3:48 PM, Kobayashi Noritada wrote:
Manpage encoding issues are seen for some packages and for some languages; some manpages are encoded in UTF-8 and unreadable in any environment.Can we specify the encoding in the manpage text in some way?No, the input encoding is determined by the locale and input manpage path, which is hard-coded in man-db's src/encodings.c.
:(Users of some languages, like mine, will need UTF8 anyway, and will set their man conf correspondingly. In any case, UTF8 will be used increasingly. It is, or should be, the standard encoding for internationalization.
Bruno Haible created groff-utf8 [1] some time ago, and I think Yelp reads UTF8 manpages. I don't know about the other readers. They will all need to aim for UTF8, anyway.
But meanwhile, we need a way to label non-UTF8 manpages, or manpages which don't match the man conf encoding setting. Bruno, what do you think? Can the manpage readers detect the encoding in some way, and report an error if it doesn't match the man conf? Or is there a better way?
My text editor (BBEdit) complains politely if any file I open doesn't appear to be UTF8. It's the sort of behaviour a user might expect. I just don't know if it's viable for manpage readers, or not. So I ask the expert. :)
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN [1] http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-groff-utf8.html
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