Re: [Groff] Re: unicode support, part 14: unicode fonts

[Keith MARSHALL]

Bruno Haible wrote, quoting me:
>>>>   1) Although the man page starts with
>>>>
>>>> '\" t -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>>>
>>>>      the groff driver is not intelligent enough to run preconv.
>>>>      I have to activate the -k option explicitly.
>>>
>> [Quoting Werner Lemberg]:
>>> This is a feature.  I think it is best to not change this -- at
>>> least not now.
>>
>> Maybe this is something that man, rather than groff, should do?
>>
>> Man already reads the first line of the man page, to check for the
>> '\" t, etc. tag; this tells it which preprocessors to include in its
>> command pipeline.  I don't think it would be too difficult to have
>> it also check for the coding tag, and add the -k option to the
>> nroff options when required,
>
> I agree.  Sorry, I had thought that groff, nroff or soelim were
> deciding whether to run 'pic', 'tbl', etc. Since it's 'man' which
> decides this, it's also 'man' which has to decide whether to run
> 'preconv'.

Yes.  And because man explicitly sets up the preprocessor pipeline,
as is required for use with a classical troff set up, preconv should
also be invoked explicitly, rather than by specifying `-k' to nroff;
(AIUI, preconv must *precede* tbl, pic and friends, in the pipeline).

> And /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh on SuSE Linux systems has to be changed as
> well.

Thanks for this pointer.  I've just installed SuSE-10, and am still in
the process of migrating my work from an old Mandrake-8.2 set up;  I
may need to know this, sooner rather than later.

Regards,
Keith.