Re: [Groff] Tascii lost

[Werner LEMBERG]

> When running homepage.ms with -Tascii (don't ask just yet):
> warning: can't find special character ':o'
> warning: can't find special character ':a'

Well, yes, this is expected.  In both German and Swedish, you can
represent `ö' and `ä' as `oe' resp. `ae'.  But this is not true
generally, AFAIK (even in German there are a special cases for foreign
words like `Boötes' -- this is a star constellation -- where the
correct ASCII representation would be `Bootes' and not `Booetes'), so
it is not possible to provide an ASCII representation which is always
valid.  The only thing we can do (and I will probably do exactly that)
is to define a macro in homepage.ms which handles this, i.e., checking
whether the umlaut characters are available, providing a substitution
if not.

> It's Jorgan Hagg, of course.

No.  It should be Joergen Haegg, of course :-)

> Similar problems, but worse, for -Tlatin1 and -Tutf8.

Which problems?  Saying

  groff -Tlatin1 -ms -markup homepage.ms | less

gives acceptable output.

Note that I'm currently updating both homepage.ms and tmac.arkup to
improve the appearance.  For example, homepage.ms will then include
tmac.arkup so that you don't need to specify it on the command line.
(Remember: tmac.arkup will be automatically loaded only if the output
device is HTML.)


    Werner