On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 07:50:20PM +0200, Martin Quinson wrote: > There was recently some work to get a manpage translated into vietnamese > (find.1), so that we can see what are the necessary steps to achieve this > task. The result is that the translation chain (mostly, gettext and po4a) is > working, but the existing groff cannot deal properly with the produced > manpage. > > Bruno Haible thus hacked a utf8-ready groff, and I would like to see it > integrated, if possible. The relevant code can be fetched from: > http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-groff-utf8.html
(Yeah, I'd seen this go by on the groff mailing list ...) Hmm. This is certainly a neat and impressive hack, but I'm a bit concerned about deploying it everywhere as-is, because I'd have to put groff-utf8 into man-db's configuration file and thus I'd end up having to support that command name forever. One alternative I've thought of is incorporating Bruno's pre/post-processors into man-db instead, and having man call them to do on-the-fly "recoding" as appropriate. As things stand, man has to be aware of the encoding of man pages anyway, and it already invokes iconv when it has to, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to have it do this substitution. I realise it's a layer above where the solution should properly live, and doesn't deal with e.g. Vietnamese -ms documents, but it should deal with the vast majority of real-world requirements until proper UTF-8 support can be incorporated into groff. I'm away on holiday all this week, but this will be an interesting thing to investigate when I get back. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
