Re: UTF-8 manual pages

[Clytie Siddall]

Sorry I couldn't reply to this earllier.

On 12/10/2007, at 11:27 PM, Adam Borowski wrote:

On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 12:22:18PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:

I have uploaded man-db 2.5.0-1, which includes the following changes of

note:

[...]

groff does not yet support UTF-8 input, so at the moment this is

requires that the page be convertible to the legacy encoding for the

equivalent in ISO-8859-1. I do not expect this to be particularly

proper names) where it may be a problem. I ask for your patience in
those cases. If you need to use a character not in the corresponding
legacy encoding, then I recommend using named character escapes as
documented in groff_char(7).

implemented by recoding in man. For the time being, the implementation language using iconv (it uses //TRANSLIT so that it will make an attempt at characters that aren't directly convertible, but that isn't perfect); so a German manual page should avoid using UTF-8 characters without an onerous for the time being, though there are a few cases (particularly

patch can be as simple as:

--- src/libs/libgroff/encoding.cc       (revision 6)
+++ src/libs/libgroff/encoding.cc       (revision 8)
@@ -369,6 +369,9 @@

   // allow it to be switchable?)
+  select_input_encoding_handler("UTF-8");
+  select_output_encoding_handler("UTF-8");
+  return;
   select_input_encoding_handler("ISO-8859-1");
   select_output_encoding_handler("C");
  (no longer relevant special cases for CJK follow)

and then instead of:

 man-db could do:
source -[?]-manconv-[UTF-8]-> groff -[UTF-8]-iconv-[$LOCALE]-> less


Too bad, output is harder.  By adjusting char widths

Actually, groff is _almost_ capable of supporting UTF-8. It understands it internally, and has problems just on input and output. For input, a minimal // groff 1 defines ISO-8859-1 as the input encoding, so this is required // for compatibility. groff 2 will define UTF-8 (or possibly officially source -[?]-manconv-[ISO-8859-1]-> groff -[ISO-8859-1]-iconv- [$LOCALE]-> less (http://angband.pl/deb/man/groff-devutf8.diff) I've got terminal output working neatly for everything but arabic/hebrew (not a regression), but I

have neither the time nor knowledge to fix PostScript and such.


least a no-regression change could be easy to do.

Yet, since the current groff supports only ISO-8859-? and CJK, I guess at

Can we package groff-utf8 [1] instead?





from Clytie

Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team
http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n

[1] http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-groff-utf8.html

Another note about Colin's original, and very well-thought-out post: I think Yelp _does_ support UTF-8. I'm pretty sure I tested my pilot Vietnamese manpage in it (as well as groff-utf8) a year or two back. There was quite a lot of discussion about UTF-8 display, on the GNOME i18n list then. Thankyou for all your efforts to get UTF-8 manpages supported and encouraged. Manpages have notoriously lagged behind other translations in this regard. It's time they caught up.

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