Hi,
At first, I must say that my current interest on "man" is for
next version of Debian. It would use current version of GNU
roff with "-Tascii8" and "-Tnippon" extension.
However, though "-Tascii8" is a useful, I admit it is a temporary
dirty makeshift. For longer scope, we will need properly
internationalized manpage system. The following discussion
is for "longer scope" and would not affect the next release
of Debian.
At Tue, 10 Apr 2001 14:41:12 +0200 (CEST),
Bruno Haible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sounds complicated indeed. Why would you convert the man page itself
> to UTF-8, when groff already has an option (-Tutf8) to produce UTF-8
> output?
>
> I'd suggest:
> - Assume the manpages are in traditional format. The groff
> developers will have to define how UTF-8 manpages shall define
> their encoding.
> - If the encoding used by the user (`locale charmap`) is UTF-8,
> add the option "-Tutf8" to the groff command line.
The 1st point is good. As a text-processing software, groff must
obey LC_CTYPE locale in default. However, it is clear that LC_CTYPE-
dependent behavior is not useful for manpage formatting, because
users can choose LC_CTYPE freely while encoding of manpage sources
are determined in installation time.
Thus, your 1st point is good. All manpage sources will have to
have some tag to define their encoding. Otherwise, the manpage
will be regarded to be written in LC_CTYPE encoding.
However, I don't think it is a good idea to specify encoding
using "-T" option. "-T" is used for device type, which is
independent concept from encoding. I suggest "-Ttty".
In default, output encoding is LC_CTYPE. If needed, output
encoding can be specified using a new command option.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
