On 11/21/2011 09:12 AM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
Hello all,I want to typeset headers in man pages (an-old.tmac) differently for text-based and PostScript devices. For the former I want them to be uppercase, while for the latter -- in the normal case, as they were typed. I thought I would prepend the TH and SH macros with code that would conditionally (.if n) enter an "all- caps" mode and append them with corresponding code to return back to normal mode; or, maybe, write wrappers around them so as to prevent any side ef- fects, like translations' affecting various traps and hooks. But it turned out that simple requests like .tr aAbBcC or .char aA do not work with Russian (non-ACSII) symbols and that I have to do: .char a\[u0431] which of course only works with the PostScript de- vice, but fails with latin1 which I use for text output. Will I have to switch to the UTF8 device instead latin1 to achieve my goal, or is there a device-in- dependent way to implement the uppercase mode? Anton
When I was responsible for HP's man pages, we had all headers in uppercase, and if the name of a command was the first word in a sentence the first character was uppercase. It was a problem for users whose native language was not English (Japanese for example), and users got confused. I went through the entire system and changed it so the name of a command, system call, etc. was always lowercase unless the actual command or name was uppercase or mixed-case. That eliminated the confusion and improved usability. I am still opposed to making typography different from actual usage because it's confusing. It's especially annoying in a world where Microsoft treats uppercase and lowercase as equivalent to cater to amateur users. But I don't like, and avoid using their software anyway. Clarke
