[Groff] Re: preconv supported encodings

[D. E. Evans]

   There is no need to support all encodings that Emacs provides, since
     1. probably a majority of users already use other text editors than Emacs,

This is not true, first of all (I'm a vi user, so bias is not
part of this).  Second, Emacs is the GNU editor, and can't be
blown off arbitrarily.

   can probably get away with 20 encodings. If I were you, I would start
   with the following set; comment out the other entries of emacs_to_mime
   entries; and comment them in on demand only.

I completely agree.

   EUC-JP is problematic because not everyone agrees about the conversion
   (see http://www.haible.de/bruno/charsets/conversion-tables/EUC-JP.html),
   but the Japanese people are so vocal that it's better to not give them
   an opportunity to complain.

I ran into so many problems with this as chief webmaster (for
GNU).  Barring a bitch-fest, I'll simply agree here as well.

   This list contains no CPxxx encodings, in particular no WINDOWS-xxxx
   encodings.  Microsoft continues to extend these encodings over
   and over again, with the result that, say, a text written today
   in CP950 on a Windows-XP machine is not readable as CP950 on an
   earlier version of the same OS. For this reason, the use of these
   encodings for manpages would be suboptimal.

Windows is on Unicode now, anyways.  Stick with Unicode, and
ignore the rest of the Windows encodings.