Re: [Groff] .hcode request with german umlauts inside utf8 input file

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Carsten,

> I have used a .hcode request with german umlauts like
> 
>     .hcode ä ä
> 
> and so on.  That had been working some time ago.  Maybe I've made the
> mistake now to save that file as utf8.  Now I get error messages like
> 
>     invalide input character code 132
> 
> and so on (from pic(1), which is the first in the pipe here).
> 
> Is utf8 input not supported?

It is not.  Not directly, anyway.

> de.tmac uses simple 8-bit input (not utf8).  But is the 8-bit code for
> the umlauts really the same on each system (at least UNIX)?

No, it is not.  :-)

Groff supports various single-byte encodings for input;  see `Input
Encodings' node in `info groff'.  To handle UTF-8 input, groff (1) has a
-k option that uses preconv(1).

    $ printf ä | hd   # I use UTF-8 here.
    00000000  c3 a4                                             |..|
    00000002
    $
    $ printf ä | groff -k -Tutf8 | grep .
    ä
    $

Cheers, Ralph.