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Re: [Groff] An uppercase mode


From: Clarke Echols
Subject: Re: [Groff] An uppercase mode
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:35:21 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110922 Thunderbird/3.1.15

On 11/21/2011 09:12 AM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
Hello all,

I want to typeset headers in man pages (an-old.tmac)
differently for text-based and  PostScript  devices.
For  the  former  I want them to be uppercase, while
for the latter -- in the normal case, as  they  were
typed.

I  thought I would prepend the TH and SH macros with
code that would conditionally (.if n) enter an "all-
caps"  mode  and append them with corresponding code
to return back to  normal  mode;  or,  maybe,  write
wrappers  around  them so as to prevent any side ef-
fects, like translations'  affecting  various  traps
and  hooks.   But it turned out that simple requests
like

    .tr aAbBcC or
    .char aA

do not work with  Russian  (non-ACSII)  symbols  and
that I have to do:

    .char a\[u0431]

which  of  course only works with the PostScript de-
vice, but fails with latin1 which  I  use  for  text
output.

Will  I  have  to  switch to the UTF8 device instead
latin1 to achieve my goal, or is there a  device-in-
dependent way to implement the uppercase mode?

Anton



When I was responsible for HP's man pages, we had all
headers in uppercase, and if the name of a command was
the first word in a sentence the first character was uppercase.

It was a problem for users whose native language was not
English (Japanese for example), and users got confused.

I went through the entire system and changed it so the name
of a command, system call, etc. was always lowercase unless
the actual command or name was uppercase or mixed-case.

That eliminated the confusion and improved usability.  I am
still opposed to making typography different from actual
usage because it's confusing.

It's especially annoying in a world where Microsoft treats
uppercase and lowercase as equivalent to cater to amateur
users.  But I don't like, and avoid using their software
anyway.

Clarke



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