On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 8:23 AM Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> > It looks right but I do see 3 warnings:
> >
> > :troff: man7/groff_char.7:1051: warning: can't find special character
> 'bs'
> > troff: man7/groff_char.7:1192: warning: can't find special character
> > 'radicalex'
> > troff: man7/groff_char.7:1195: warning: can't find special character
> > 'sqrtex'
>
> I get these warnings too, on a GNU system; so, you can ignore them.
>
> > For example, in the Arrows section I see:
> >
> > Arrows
> >
> > l l l l lx. Output Input PostScript Unicode Notes _
> > ← \[<-] arrowleft u2190 horizontal arrow left +
> > → \[->] arrowright u2192 horizontal arrow right +
> > ↔ \[<>] arrowboth u2194 T{ horizontal arrow in both
> direc‐
> > tions T} ↓ \[da] arrowdown u2193 vertical arrow down +
> > ↑ \[ua] arrowup u2191 vertical arrow up +
> > ↕ \[va] arrowupdn u2195 T{ vertical arrow in both
> > directions
> > T} ⇐ \[lA] arrowdblleft u21D0 horizontal double arrow
> > left
> > ⇒ \[rA] arrowdblright u21D2 horizontal double arrow
> right
> > ⇔ \[hA] arrowdblboth u21D4 T{ horizontal double
> arrow in
>
> Nice! That's how it's supposed to be (in an environment that can display
> Unicode).
>
> > and this change being discussed is what gets me to proper UTF-8 rendering
> > (although perhaps there is a better way to fix this)
>
> That's what I claim.
>
> When I run the groff command in different locales:
> $ LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 groff -Tutf8 -mandoc man7/groff_char.7 > ~/out1
> $ LC_ALL=de_DE.ISO-8859-1 groff -Tutf8 -mandoc man7/groff_char.7 > ~/out2
> the output files ~/out1 and ~/out2 are identical.
>
> Therefore, once the option -Tutf8 has been passed to groff, the locale's
> encoding is irrelevant.
>
> When you run "man groff_char", these pieces of software are involved:
> A) man
> B) the gnulib parts included in 'man'
> C) groff
> D) the gnulib parts included in 'groff'
>
> The experiment above shows that C) and D) don't need changes.
>
> I believe the fix needs to be in A), not B).
>
> It is likely that A) does a call to nl_langinfo(CODESET) or
> locale_charset(),
> to decide which options to pass to groff and potentially whether to call
> iconv. This is perfectly normal, because when the console / xterm /
> terminal
> can only display ISO-8859-1 characters, it would be wrong if 'man' sent
> arbitrary Unicode characters to the console.
>
> So, the questions are:
> 1) How is it possible that on z/OS most of the ASCII-based software forms
> an ISO-8859-1 environment, yet the UTF-8 encoded groff output displays
> just fine?
> 2) How to teach 'man' about this particular environment?
>
Thanks for the detailed response. I will dig in.
>
> Bruno
>
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>
is there a way to get gmail to change it's default 😁
