Werner LEMBERG wrote on 2000-08-08 09:47 UTC:
> Additionally, you can't expect glibc 2.2 on all platforms,
> and I don't like `extensions' which only work with a specific C library.
I think, there is a missunderstanding here. You would only be using
official ISO C functions (wprintf() and friends) that have been in ISO/
IEC 9989 since 1994. They just weren't implemented completely in glibc
before version 2.2. They have been available for quite some time under
reasonably well-maintained commercial Unices (Solaris, AIX, etc.). It is
not the case that this is a specific proprietary extension of glibc, it
is just old standard functionality that couldn't be recommended so far,
because glibc still lacked a proper implementation of it so far. This is
about to change however, and now you can finally provide in a
standardized way to the C library a Unicode wchar_t string, and then it
will do the I/O in the locale-dependent character encoding for you.
We could of course fix this quite easily in man as I outlined. I just
wanted to note that the conceptually far cleaner solution would be to
have groff provide a locale-dependent output directly, which man then
can just pass on to the pager transparently without having to get
involved with character encoding issues.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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