Re: [groff] Regularize (sub)section cross references.

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-12-17T08:28:07+0100, Pierre-Jean Fichet wrote:
> 
> Hello alls,
> 
> "G. Branden Robinson" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > +.ie \\$1 .tr aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ
> > +.el      .tr aabbccddeeffgghhiijjkkllmmnnooppqqrrssttuuvvwwxxyyzz
> 
> The problem with this, is that it ignores all but english languages.

Yup.  I'm aware of that, which is why I did not propose it as an
actual patch.  It's just a proof of concept, and it does work, as far as
it goes--which is not far enough for non-English languages or the rare
occasions when English words avail themselves of diacritics.

Examples: résumé, fiancé, naïve, coöperation, reëntrant, ... [1]

> "élément", for instance, would become "éLéMENT", which is the ugliest
> thing you can get. And yes, there are man pages in french, and I
> believe, in a lot of other languages.

I'm aware.

The biggest problem I know of is that the uppercasing transform of
German sharp S "ß" goes to "SS".  (A recent version of Unicode did
introduce a capital sharp S but it might have only specialized uses; I'm
not sure all Germans would find it acceptable.)

A 1-to-2 character mapping of course is beyond the ability of .tr.

As I think John Gardner said, what we really need is a roff request to
expose the underlying C library's toupper() and tolower() functions.

A good feature to precede this one into 1.22.5, perhaps?

Regards,
Branden

[1] All of these can be spelled without diacritics, but it is also
acceptable according to most style manuals I've seen to preserve them,
especially when they help to disambiguate pronunciation.  The magazine
_New Yorker_ is somewhat notorious for clinging to the dieresis as a
signifier that a vowel cluster should not be pronounced as a diphthong.

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