Re: add __MVS__ to list of systems that should default to UTF-8 in localcharset.c

[Mike Fulton]

Hi

It looks right but I do see 3 warnings:

:troff: man7/groff_char.7:1051: warning: can't find special character 'bs'
troff: man7/groff_char.7:1192: warning: can't find special character 'radicalex'
troff: man7/groff_char.7:1195: warning: can't find special character 'sqrtex'

For example, in the Arrows section I see:

       Arrows

       l l l l lx.  Output    Input     PostScript     Unicode   Notes _
       ←    \[<-]     arrowleft u2190     horizontal arrow left +
       →    \[->]     arrowright     u2192     horizontal arrow right +
       ↔    \[<>]     arrowboth u2194     T{ horizontal arrow in both direc‐
       tions T} ↓    \[da]     arrowdown u2193     vertical arrow down +
       ↑    \[ua]     arrowup   u2191     vertical arrow up +
       ↕    \[va]     arrowupdn u2195     T{ vertical arrow in both directions
       T} ⇐    \[lA]     arrowdblleft   u21D0     horizontal double arrow left
       ⇒    \[rA]     arrowdblright  u21D2     horizontal double arrow right
       ⇔    \[hA]     arrowdblboth   u21D4     T{ horizontal double arrow in

(hopefully this renders right in the forum - it looks right in my email editor). 

Also - with 'man --locale=ja vim' I see the first 3 lines as:

VIM(1)                                                                              General Commands Manual                                                                              VIM(1)

名前
       vim - Vi IMproved, プログラマのテキストエディタ

This doesn't work if I don't default to UTF-8 because man ends up losing information mapping to single-byte

I wrote a short blog also on 'man' (and libiconv!): https://makingdeveloperslivesbetter.wordpress.com/2023/05/29/the-wonderful-world-of-man-uals/

and this change being discussed is what gets me to proper UTF-8 rendering (although perhaps there is a better way to fix this)

Thanks, mike

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 5:26 AM Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:

Mike Fulton wrote:
> I would like to request the __MVS__ macro be added so that z/OS will
> default to UTF-8, e.g.
>
> # if (defined __APPLE__ && defined __MACH__) || defined __BEOS__ || defined
> __HAIKU__ || defined __MVS__
>         codeset = "UTF-8";
> # else

This doesn't seem right. I understand from [1] that the primary ASCII-
compatible encoding on z/OS is ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8.

> I am currently using this patch for man-db so that it can correctly render
> UTF-8 man pages.

man-db relies on groff, and consists of several programs. It's likely that
one of these programs needs a modification.

Does "groff -Tutf8 -mandoc man7/groff_char.7 | less -R" (in a UTF-8 console)
produce good-looking output? If yes, then the problem is likely in the man-db
package, otherwise in the groff package.

Bruno

[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.2.0?topic=functions-e2a-s-convert-string-from-ebcdic-ascii