Re: [Groff] Re: man page encoding

[Bruno Haible]

Andries,

> It is not at all an unimportant detail whether it changes to utf-8 or
> ascii with escape sequences. My own preprocessors halfway that pipeline
> do not know about utf-8, and do not know about these escape sequences
> either. Still I am told that compatibility mode should work.

?? What is the relation between groff's compatibility mode and the
possibility that your own preprocessors cannot handle non-ASCII troff input
in either form?

> Is it not far simpler to document that groff must be called with a file
> coded in ASCII or Latin-1 or UTF-8?

If we did this,

  1) We would need a heuristic to decide whether a given file is Latin1
     or UTF-8. And "heuristic" is equivalent to "bug by design". Better
     avoid it.

  2) We would have low acceptance from the people who produce man pages in
     EUC-JP, with the consequence that these "-Tnippon" hacks in groff
     (or equivalent hacks in "man" in some distributions) would need to stay
     forever.

Bruno