[about converting man pages to UTF-8]
> They just have to send non-ASCII/non-UTF-8 man pages once through
> iconv before packaging them.
Almost. They should also add
\# -*- coding: utf8 -*-
as the first line.
> End users who install third-party non-ASCII/ non-UTF-8 man pages
> (pretty few people do that actually), also have to apply iconv once
> to the installed man page, if it turns out that it is not already in
> UTF-8 anyway. If someone forgot doing it, groff will spot malformed
> UTF-8 sequences and should abort with a message like:
>
> ERROR: the source document /usr/local/man/man4/whatever.4 contains
> non-ASCII characters but is apparently not UTF-8 encoded.
> SOLUTION: Please determine the original encoding of this source
> document and use "iconv" or a similar recoding tool to convert it
> to UTF-8.
I won't do this. Man pages not explicitly marked as UTF-8 (or another
encoding scheme which the encoding preprocessor can handle) will be
treated as latin1 for backwards compatibility. Since no UTF-8 man
pages yet exist I will pretend to be God, giving you this as the 11th
commandment.
BTW, this preprocessor already exists (written by Tomohiro-san).
Werner
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
