Hello developers,
this mail is related to the previous message by Werner LEMBERG where he
documented the -K option of the CVS version of groff. This option allows
one to specify the input encoding, and one can use construction like the
following in order to get a formatted manual page as UTF-8 output:
groff -K input_charset -Tutf8 -mandoc /path/to/manual/page.1
And, if the manual page is ISO-8859-1 encoded, the -K option is not needed.
UTF-8 locale users can stick this into their man.conf and be happy. But
what about those who prefer to use old-style 8-bit locales? Groff cannot
output ISO-8859-X where X != 1. I tried to model how various non-UTF-8
users would do this, using the English hosts_access.5 manual page from
the tcpwrappers package, which should be viewable from any locale.
1) The old -Tlatin1 hack mostly works. But it's still a hack.
2) The following command attempts to convert Groff UTF-8 output to the
locale charset:
groff -Tutf8 -mandoc hosts_access.5 | iconv -f UTF-8
but this chokes on the first hyphen. Let's attempt to tell iconv to use
the best approximation:
groff -Tutf8 -mandoc hosts_access.5 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t //TRANSLIT
This is better, but still not ideal. Details:
in ISO-8859-1 based locales, everything looks good, but quotes differ
from what gets printed with the -Tlatin1 switch.
in ISO-8859-{3,7,8,9,10,13,15,16} and KOI8-* based locales, the bullets
become bullets! A huge improvement over the -Tlatin1 hack.
in ISO-8859-{2,4,5,6,11,14} and TIS-620 based locales, the bullets are
replaced with question marks. Well, they were not bullets either with
the -Tlatin1 hack. But the question mark is simply not right.
So my question is how to avoid this. The answer "use -Tascii for such
manual pages" won't be accepted until Man stops using one Groff line for
all manual pages: -Tascii damages Polish manuals. The answer "patch
glibc so that iconv transliterates the bullet to 'o'" is better (and in
fact this is doable), but I think that users of non-Glibc systems (or
old Glibc) will complain if this becomes the official answer.
So: what is the official recommendation upon formatting manual pages in
non-ISO-8859-1 non-UTF-8 locales with the CVS version of Groff?
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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