Re: [groff] 01/08: mdoc: Accept mixed-case section headings.

[Dave Kemper]

On 9/15/20, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2020-09-16T00:13:30+1000, John Gardner wrote:
>> .if n \{\
>> .tr aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ
>> \\$1
>> .tr aabbccddeeffgghhiijjkkllmmnnooppqqrrssttuuvvwwxxyyzz
>> .\}
>
> Oh, no!  I went to the trouble of implementing new requests (.stringup,
> .stringdown) to keep people from having to type (or copy and paste)
> messes like the above,

Straying away from man-page considerations and comparing these two
approaches in general:

The .string* requests also have the advantage of handling alphabetic
Latin-1 characters and the roff escapes that represent them (though
.stringup fails kind of messily on roff escapes representing
nonalphabetic Latin-1 characters, such as \[de]).

However, if input must go through preconv, the .string* requests
remove all non-ASCII characters (alphabetic or otherwise) from strings
passed to them and emit warnings for each one.  The .tr approach,
while failing to convert non-ASCII alphabetic characters, does
preserve them.

.tr is also portable to non-groff roffs.

So there are trade-offs to either approach.