Re: groff 1.23.0.rc2 readiness

[John Gardner]

>
> I have no problem adding an item to the PROBLEMS file with a chunk of
> groff source that people can put in their site "man.local" or "troffrc"
> files to achieve the ASCII-degradation of the five glyphs that novice man
> page writers abuse so copiously.


Can we *please* be practical about this?

90% of Groff users, if not more, are only doing so via man(1) to read man
pages. Many of whom are probably oblivious to the existence of a
typesetting system underneath that's powering it all. They won't care about
local configuration, they'll just be annoyed that there's another bunch of
annoying characters they need to replace in anything copy+pasted from a
terminal. Think Stack Overflow posts containing ˆ and ˜ by hapless users
unaware that a regex or path they just copied contain what're essentially
diacritics without a character.

Which reminds me: *these characters were designed to be overstruck*. A + ˆ
= Â, A + ˜ = Ã. In a PDF or PostScript document, or with a hardware
teletype, this sort of composition is easy. In a modern terminal
environment, not so much. They're not making typesetting any better,
they're only making user experience worse.

Now, we can deplore the state of man page authorship as much as we like,
but the truth is that most software authors won't see this as a problem on
their end, or with end user configuration. They'll see this as a regression
in the latest version of Groff and will file bug reports accordingly.

If you still decide to go ahead: Don't say I didn't warn you.

On Fri, 27 May 2022 at 01:23, G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> At 2022-05-27T00:38:31+1000, John Gardner wrote:
> > Please consider #62494 <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62494> ASAP.
>
> I'm afraid I have to say I _have_ considered it; I just haven't mustered
> the energy to write a message pushing back on you and Ingo about it yet.
>
> So, here's Mean Mr. Mustard.
>
> Anybody who's read the previous discussion(s) we've had on this list
> about it, or the current version of the groff_char(7) man page, will be
> aware of my objections (the latter because I think those objections
> follow from a historical understanding of troff special characters).
>
> > Otherwise, it's going to piss a lot of users off.
>
> I have no problem adding an item to the PROBLEMS file with a chunk of
> groff source that people can put in their site "man.local" or "troffrc"
> files to achieve the ASCII-degradation of the five glyphs that novice
> man page writers abuse so copiously.
>
> I don't think man pages should have to be written one way for terminals
> and another for PDF, whence goes the road you and Ingo are walking.  It
> is therefore important to make these ASCII-degradations contingent on
> (1) usage of the man(7) package and (2) output to the 'utf8' device.
>
> If it were to go in man.local, it would look something like this.
>
> .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
> .  char ' \[aq]
> .  char - \-
> .  char ^ \[ha]
> .  char ` \[ga]
> .  char ~ \[ti]
> .\}
>
> Is the foregoing enough to satisfy anyone?
>
> If every *nix vendor in the world seizes upon the above and adds it, I
> can view it with equanimity.  We can at best model correct behavior in
> our own distribution.  I expect I'll have to spend some effort writing
> patches against several man(7)-generation tools, some of which are
> probably utterly stagnant, unmaintained, and unreceptive, and the output
> of which man page writers who don't read any of _our_ documentation draw
> upon for imitation.  I harbor no illusion that achieving correct glyph
> usage will not be a long road.
>
> Quixotically yours,
> Branden
>