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Re: [Groff] tilde glyph


From: Ingo Schwarze
Subject: Re: [Groff] tilde glyph
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2017 21:27:50 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.6.2 (2016-07-01)

Hi,

Ralph Corderoy wrote on Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 08:01:09PM +0000:
> Doug McIlroy wrote:

>> It appears that a tilde (unicode 07E) input to groff -Tpdf comes out
>> as a diacritical (unicode 303). This happens even when the tilde is
>> entered as \N'126'.  How can I get 07E?

> `asciitilde', as PostScript calls it, is `\(ti';  see groff_char(7).

Also see http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc_char.7#NUMBERED_CHARACTERS :

  "NUMBERED CHARACTERS

  For backward compatibility with existing manuals, mandoc(1) also
  supports the

        \N'number'

  escape sequence, inserting the character number from the current
  character set into the output.  Of course, this is inherently
  non-portable and is already marked as deprecated in the Heirloom
  roff manual.  For example, do not use \N'34', use \(dq, or even
  the plain '"' character where possible."

Here, one aspect of "non-portable" is that \N may not work as
expected with some output devices, if they use character sets
differing from what the author of the document had in mind.

For cases where no named character escape sequence exists,
you can use the groff Unicode escape sequence syntax \[u007E].
That is portable across output devices (as far as they support
Unicode, of course), but not necessarily portable to roff
implementations other than groff.

So, Ralph's suggestion is better in this case than \[u007E],
both for portability reasons and because it's more reable for
humans.

Yours,
  Ingo



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