Hi Branden,
On 5/26/22 17:23, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
[...]
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).
[...]
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?
[...]
FWIW, I sympathize with wanting the correct glypths, instead of
workarounding within groff(1) the laziness of manual page writers. The
Linux man-pages are correct in that sense, at least as far as I know,
and advise in man-pages(7) how to do it correctly (as groff_man*(7) also
does).
We know there are still many manual pages that don't have the correct
escapes, but I think we should aim to fix them, and by breaking them
(not very badly; just a little bit), we might help get them fixed.
Many times, when I have to serach for a command option in a manual page,
I notice '-' isn't correctly escaped, and report it (curl(1), gpg(1),
...). I have fixed a few packages in that regard, and expect to fix
many more. I would actually be slightly upset if groff(1) would hide
that issue to me in the terminal so that I only notice later in the PDF
(or HTML too?).
Cheers,
Sancho^W Alex
Quixotically yours,
Branden
