Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files

[Keith Marshall]

On 22/07/17 21:17, Ted Harding wrote:
> On Sat, 2017-07-22 at 15:32 -0400, Mike Bianchi wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 06:19:29PM +0100, Keith Marshall wrote:
>>> On 22/07/17 15:06, John Gardner wrote:
>>>> ... Can I semi-seriously implore the world to only use UTF-8, and
>>>> pretend other encodings don't exist?
>>>
>>> Not really going to happen, for as long as MS-Windows remains the 
>>> dominant OS for personal computer platforms.  
>>
>> I have documents, nroff, troff and others (plus sh/ksh/awk/sed/...
>> scripts), dating back to the mid-1970s.  Many of those *roff
>> documents still format correctly.
>>
>> The thing I _like_ about the *nix OSs is they don't demand I
>> upconvert just because a "better way" comes along.
>>
>> Remember when the "modern" way to archive was to put everything
>> onto microfiche?
> 
> I completely agree with Mike!

So do I, but my original point is completely orthogonal.  Sure, for 
those of us who are sufficiently enlightened to favour *nix platforms 
over MS-Windows, we have that luxury; unfortunately, the majority of 
computer user's today swallow the Microsoft hype, so lack any such 
enlightenment.

> Of course it would be a good thing to *extend* groff's capabilities
> so that it can cope (optionally) with recent developments, but in my
> view it *must* keep its original capabilities, and those that have
> evolved since (say) the 1980s (which is where many of my own troff
> source files date back to).

The very reason that I put significant effort into making groff run 
reliably on Windows was because, in the face of corporate stupidity 
forcing me dowm the MS-Windows path, I needed to maintain and update 
documentation for a legacy process control system, which I needed to 
keep operational up until around 2010.  Groff was a much better fit 
for that requirement than would have been MS-Word -- management's 
preference, but ultimately, entirely unsuitable.

The simple reality is that, if we wish to preserve groff's current 
utility on MS-Windows, insistence on UTF-8 only as an input encoding 
is not a viable option.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.