Follow-up Comment #8, bug #66675 (group groff): I sure don't want to undo progress toward a major goal. But I feel like a lot of what is described here is missing the bigger picture.
Most places in groff that a \[] character comes up, whatever's inside the
brackets has no _meaning_ to groff. It's just an identifier, that gets
matched to a symbol name somewhere: ultimately, either from a font file, or
defined by a .char-family request. (The complex rules in the manual under
"GNU troff searches for a symbol as follows" all boil down to one of these two
sources.) That some of these identifiers happen to follow a naming convention
that _also_ indicates a Unicode character is, as far as groff itself was
concerned, irrelevant. That's for the convenience of humans who want to know
what that symbol represents. So groff trying to divine meaning from this
identifier is usually the wrong thing to do.
What if you have a string that is also serving double duty in, say, a PDF
table of contents entry, where groff itself isn't rendering this string, but
needs to encode it in a way that some other piece of software _can_ render it?
In that case, identifiers that _are_ also unicode characters matter.
But such a string may contain the both symbol \[u2026] and the symbol
\[gobbledygook]. Groff can figure out that one of those represents a Unicode
character, and encode it properly in the TOC. What does it do with
\[gobbledygook]? I have no idea, but that's a question it has to answer for
_any_ symbol it can't directly put into a TOC--whether that symbol is
\[gobbledygook] or \[u202Z]. Neither is a Unicode character, but the fact
that one isn't but looks like it _could_ be, whereas the other isn't and looks
nothing like one, ought to be immaterial. Handling them differently seems
fundamentally wrong.
OK, now you can tell me where I'm misunderstanding some essential aspect of
the problem that invalidates everything I wrote.
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