Bug#440420: [PROPOSAL] Manual page encoding
On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 01:35:48PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 02:04:32PM +0200, Jens Seidel wrote:
> > 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?
>
> > 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?
>
> I do appreciate that there are a few gotchas here. I think it is unduly
> So I'd really rather just support plain
> UTF-8 input for alphanumerics, which I think will actually get used.
>
> Do you think we will need explicit language in policy for this? For the
Ah, no. But it should be documented somewhere and I wondered about this
after reading again your proposed patch (and the further info).
> This seems like a
> reasonable thing to document after man-db 2.5.0, and would cover things
> like UTF-8 hyphen characters.
Right. Without documentation every maintainer could now start fine tuning
man pages using all the stuff provided by Unicode ...
> In general, I think it's worthwhile for policy to make comments on
> encoding for purposes of interoperability and standardisation, but I'd
> be inclined to draw the line at filling it up with instructions on how
> to use groff correctly. Does this sound reasonable?
Yes, it does.
Thanks,
Jens
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