Re: Re: [Groff] man page encoding

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

Sorry, replied to the old address.

Greg

----- Forwarded message from Greg 'groggy' Lehey <address@hidden> -----

> Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 08:36:16 +0930
> From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <address@hidden>
> To: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, Andries Brouwer <address@hidden>,
>       address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Groff] man page encoding
>
> On Tuesday,  5 July 2005 at 19:41:13 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
>> Andries,
>>
>> Currently on a Linux system you find man pages in the following encodings:
>>   - ISO-8859-1 (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Brasilian, ...),
>>   - ISO-8859-2 (Hungarian, Polish, ...),
>>   - KOI8-R (Russian),
>>   - EUC-JP (Japanese),
>>   - UTF-8 (Vietnamese),
>>   - ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16 (man7/*),
>> and none of them contains an encoding marker.
>>
>> The goal is that "groff -T... -mandoc" on any man page works, without
>> need to specify the encoding as an argument to groff.
>>
>> There are two options:
>>   a) Recognize only UTF-8 encoded man pages. This is the simplest.
>>      groff will be changed to emit errors when it is fed a non-UTF-8
>>      input, so that the man page maintainers are notified that they need to
>>      convert their man page to UTF-8.
>
> Obviously this can only be an option, not a requirement.
>
>>   b) Recognize the encoding according to a note in the first line
>>         '\" -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
>>      groff will then emit errors when it is fed input that is non-ASCII and
>>      without coding: marker, so that man page maintainers are notified that
>>      they need to add the coding: marker.
>
> This looks like it would conflict with Emacs usage.  I like the idea,
> but wouldn't it be more appropriate to make it into a groff request?

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Greg 'groggy' Lehey <address@hidden> -----

> Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:18:09 +0930
> From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <address@hidden>
> To: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, Andries Brouwer <address@hidden>,
>       address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Groff] man page encoding
>
> On Wednesday,  6 July 2005 at 13:27:42 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
>> Greg Lehey wrote:
>>>>   b) Recognize the encoding according to a note in the first line
>>>>         '\" -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
>>>>      groff will then emit errors when it is fed input that is non-ASCII
>>>> and without coding: marker, so that man page maintainers are notified
>>>> that they need to add the coding: marker.
>>>
>>> This looks like it would conflict with Emacs usage.
>>
>> Where is the conflict? This is precisely the syntax for declaring an
>> encoding to Emacs, and by now Emacs also recognizes standard encoding
>> names like "GB2312" and "UTF-8".
>
> It's also the method to describe a minor mode to Emacs.  For example,
> all my documents start with:
>
>   .\" This file is in -*- nroff-fill -*- mode
>
> More importantly though, you intend this to talk to groff, not to
> Emacs.
>
>>> wouldn't it be more appropriate to make it into a groff request?
>>
>> Yes, I'm talking about planned changes to groff.
>
> groff defines the term 'request' specially: it refers to the commands
> that start at the beginning of the line with . or '.  I was thinking
> more like:
>
>   .Character-Encoding EUC-JP
>
> This would incidentally also allow changing the character set in
> mid-stream, at least syntactically.  I suspect there may be reasons
> that make it impractical.

----- End forwarded message -----

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