Re: [Groff] What's missing for Unicode support of groff?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> >    The agreement was to recognize the encoding according to a note
> >    in the first line
> >            '\" -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
> 
> Who made this agreement?

It has been discussed on the groff list starting about five years ago.

> I'm a mere groff user, while you seem to arrive from a Linux manpage
> i18n project.  Is that the group that reached the agreement?

Implementing a UTF-8 device *must* come with proper means to convert
documents in legacy encodings automatically to UTF-8.  This is a
requirement not tied with the man program.

> - This kind of change needs to be thought through carefully.
>   Dreaking existing documents is something that might anger a lot of
>   people.  The user who sees a new groff fail on an old document is
>   not always in a position to modify it, and the author may not be
>   in a position to reach all her readers with updated versions.

I'm very aware of backwards compatibility, and the default -- this is,
calling groff with C locale, and without environment variable or
command line settings -- will be latin-1 for all devices except -Tutf8
and -Tascii.


    Werner