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

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi John,

John Gardner wrote on Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 11:06:56AM +1100:

> I don't really see what the problem is. Documentation offers readers one
> language at a time. Sure, multilingual authors might split each page into,
> say, English or French. But unless it's crippling lack of Unicode/UTF-8
> support which stops Groff from embracing the UCS
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set> in both its
> syntax and output,

So far, groff is doing surprisingly little wide character and
multibyte character processing indeed.  Unless i botched grepping
the source tree - which is hindered by the noise from gnulib -
basically the only wide character interface used right now appears
to be wcwidth(3).  All the same, UTF-8 output works quite well.
So no, there is no crippling lack of UTF-8 support.

> then I fail to see why we're even considering
> locale-specific anything....

The return values of the towupper(3) function are mildly locale-dependent,
even if only for a handful of characters like the Turkish i.  Using that
function would prevent groff from having to deal with any locale(1)
dependencies.

Tadziu explained why one might hesitate using towupper(3), while i think
its complexity is comparable to wcwidth(3), or at least not much worse.

*If* we want to avoid use of that function, then we have to do some
language-specific macro development.  I think using towupper(3) is
actually simpler, but there are no doubt arguments both ways.

Yours,
  Ingo