Re: [groff] devutf8 on Windows

[Jeff Conrad]

On Tuesday, February 26, 2019 7:53 AM, Eli Zaretskii Wrote:

> you mean, you don't have objdump?  Then download Dependency Walker
> from the above URL and use that.

I actually had objdump and Dependency Walker; not sure the last time I
used either.  I don’t show MSVCRT.dll with either one.  I still haven’t
figured out how to force dynamic linking; would you like a copy of my
statically linked executable to see if it behaves the same on your
system?

> > CP1252 seems to work fine for me.
> 
> With Lucida Console font, I presume?  Try the Raster Fonts for a
> change, and you will see something very different, I think.

Lucida Console is indeed the only option, and as mentioned, it’s missing
some characters, e.g., hyphen (U+2010), prime (\(fm, U+2032), and Prime
(\(sd, U+2033).  The last two get the usual fakes (‘'’ and ‘"’) with
CP1252; the hyphen with UTF-8 is tougher.  Raster fonts (and most other
TTs and OTs) are much worse; I haven’t used them for years.

I’ve heard there is a better option than LC, but can’t seem to find it.

> > Ultimately, though, what’s the alternative? “Yer screwed”?  ASCII, with
> > its weird quotes (fixed on my system years ago, but still a typewriter)?
> > Like I had in 1987 ... somethin’ doesn’t seem right.

> My alternative is to use Emacs ;-)  It can display UTF-8 on Windows
> without any problems.

We’re bordering on religion here ... or maybe just habit.  I use vi (a
graphical version from MKS, sometimes Vim).  With Lucida Console, of
course.  I do use Emacs if I need to patch a binary file.  Years ago, on
a system that would handle 15 people using vi, one instance of Emacs
would bring the system to its knees.  I’m sure things have changed; some
habits haven’t.

> > It seems like it just shouldn’t be this difficult ... silly me.
> 
> Some day it will be.  But not today.

This is what I said 30 years ago ... and then Unicode was the solution!
Kinda ...

For now, CP1252 seems the best option.  Whatever its limitations, it’s
better than ASCII or Latin1. For display, anyway.

Jeff