Re: Bug#440420: [PROPOSAL] Manual page encoding
Hi Colin,
there is maybe one item which should be clarified.
On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 11:52:57AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> Thanks. I hope that my comments above clarify some further confusion. I
> would still appreciate concrete information and examples on why you
> don't like the idea of manual pages being installed in UTF-8 (noting
> that as a package maintainer or a translator you wouldn't have to
> actually edit it in that encoding if you didn't want to, it doesn't have
> to be done urgently or on any kind of flag day, I have addressed the
> non-Latin concern above, and it will not have a negative effect on users
> of non-UTF-8 locales).
Is it save to use UTF-8 characters if a very similar character exists in
ASCII or can be expressed using groff macros? Think about the many
dashes which exist in typography. Is it OK to use a UTF-8 hyphen sign
instead of \(hy (same for en-dash, em-dash, ...) especially as the
ordinary minus "-" is very similar in the output?
Will man-db support all kind of white spaces (such as ) ...?
This could make recodings a difficult task and I also do not know how to
recognize such a character without an hex editor.
Of course there exist transliterations of all these characters I'm
currently talking about but it would probably make the live easier to
restrict to ASCII if possible, right?
Isn't there not also more than one way to express accented characters
such as ä (as a single character and as "'a' followed by accent"?
Jens
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