Re: [Groff] Re: groff: radical re-implementation

[Tomohiro KUBOTA]

Hi,

At Sat, 21 Oct 2000 15:39:24 +0100 (BST),
(Ted Harding) <address@hidden> wrote:

> Someone writing a document about Middle Eastern and related literatures
> may wish to use the Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish (all of which have
> different scripts), and also various Central Asian languages (such as
> Turkmen) which are often written in Cyrillic or in a variant of Cyrillic.
> 
> Can you explain how this could be handled "via locale technology"
> in a single document?

In UTF-8 or ISO-2022 locale, if the OS supports it.
For example, "en_US.UTF-8" .   "en_US" part can be anything which
the OS supports.

Please consult:
  "docs.sun.com: Unicode Support in the Solaris Operiting Environment"
  
http://docs.sun.com/ab2/coll.651.1/SOLUNICOSUPPT/@Ab2TocView?Ab2Lang=C&Ab2Enc=iso-8859-1
and you will understand how UTF-8 can be used in "locale" technology.

Ok, the preprocessor which I am writing will support both "locale" mode
and conventional mode (for compatibility).  The conventional mode will
support Latin-1, EBCDIC, and UTF-8.  Thus, you can use UTF-8 even on
OSes which don't support UTF-8 locale.


> [One of the dangers which I fear if groff were re-structured on a
> "locale" basis, or similar mechanism. is that its flexibility, indeed in
> principle its universality, would be compromised and limited by the
> constraints of that mechanism. It is perhaps not recognised widely
> eough that groff, in its present state, is capable of being greatly
> extended -- by means of user-defined macros, preprocessors, and
> post-processors -- without fundamental change to troff.]

Can you write a macro which enable locale-sensible file/tty I/O?

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/