On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 09:59:46AM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: : By author: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : > One temporary solution might be that man page authors should typeset all : > ASCII strings that are intended to be used verbatimly by users in a : > monospaced typewriter font. In that case, gnroff should not interpret : > these ASCII characters as mnemonics for non-ASCII characters, but should : > just pass them on transparently. : > : : ICK No!
What's so ick about it? POD documents have had an "absolute verbatim" mode from the beginning, and it has worked out pretty well in practice. Only rarely do you need to install metasyntax into such text, and there are ways to handle those exceptions. And in any case, at least some of our beloved metasyntax might better be represented by Unicode characters than by bold/italic. : > The longterm solution is to remove the ASCII mnemonics from grep : > entirely, turn man page source files into proper UTF-8 files, to avoid : > such translation accidents. : : Not going to happen any time soon. There is a huge corpus of this : already, and it's just not going to be easy. Certainly. But as with any large-scale migration, you just have to put the mechanism in place to enable people to migrate a little at a time, and the rest will take care of itself. In this case, it's just a matter of being able to distinguish files in the new format from files in the old format. Of course, if you make a way to translate the old format to something resembling the new format, the transition can happen more quickly. Larry -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
