RE: [Groff] man problem: Latin1 characters in nion-Latin1 locale

[Andrej Borsenkow]

>
>
> > Is there any way to configure groff to _not_ assume that ISO-8859-1
> > is in use?  Preferably with some parameters - I do not want to
> > recompile it.
>
> Not yet.  It is still hard-coded, unfortunately.  I've got a patch
> which adds an `ascii8' device to avoid this dependency, and I will
> eventually include that (or probably find a different solution).
>

Yes, I came to the same idea finally.

> For the moment, I suggest to use the .shc request to assign a
> different character to the soft hyphen character, in case this is the
> only problem you have.  Otherwise, use -Tascii.
>

Unfortunately, -Tascii completely screws up russian man pages :-) So, I assume
I can put up with hyphen problem - it seems like the only one. Ideally, shc
should be set contdionally depending on currentl locale.

But speaking about man pages and i18n - there is more about.

Russian words in average are longer than English (the same applies to German,
BTW :-) and without hyphenation display loks ugly, with several words and
large inter-words gaps. I assume, we could find hypehnation table in TeX, just
as for english - but here are some problems.

Currently, hyphenation table for US is uncondtitionally loaded. Is it possible
to load more than one table, like Russian?

Second, there are three widely used russian charsets and one "standard" one.
Is it possible to access current locale in troffrc? Given possible variety of
locale names, something like locale alias table looks reasonable. I may try to
implement something like this.

cheers

-andrej