Hello, I proposed Colin to work on it during Debconf, but still had no time to do it.
Interested peoples should read #196762 I tested a CVS snapshot of groff, and now it supports UTF-8 inputs (thanks to the preconv preprocessor) without patches. There is at least one remaining issue, which is that it does not recognize family of glyphs. Thus all glyphs are considered of the same size (we won't provide a font description file with the list of every UTF characters), and thus the output of groff is ugly. (Except for this issue, I could display nicely French, English, Japanese and Vietnamese UTF-8 manpages) I will port the part of ENABLE_MULTIBYTE which permits to specify ranges of characters, and see if it looks OK. All this is based on still unreleased software. I don't think using 0.19 would help supporting UTF-8 manpages in Debian (and porting ENABLE_MULTIBYTE would be necessary). The CVS version looks much more promising. (But if you want to try 0.19, just have a look at the above bug number, there is a patch mentioned in the bug log) The CVS version introduced a -K option to specify the encoding of the input file to groff. This should help to plan a transition for UTF-8 manpages by using this option in man-db. Slowly moving files from man/ to man.UTF-8/ while still supporting the legacy encoding in man/ would be a simple transition plan. BTW, if you want to provide a kanji-form, you can try something like: .warn 0 キムタク \N'12461'\N'12512'\N'12479'\N'12463' Kimutaku <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The .warn 0 should stop any warning. The kanji-form will not be supported and won't be displayed until it's supported. This should not bother the other lines providing the romanji-form of the author. Note: the only real issue with lack of UTF-8 support for manpages in Debian is that it is not possible to provide manpages translated in languages whose only valid encoding is UTF (e.g. Vietnamese). Otherwise our man-db/groff combination works really nicely and permits to display manpages with very little annoyances (i.e. I don't consider having to drop my cedilla in manpages to be a real issue). UTF-8 is supported on output, so it is really transparent for users. Best Regards, -- Nekral -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
