Re: [Groff] man problem under non-latin1 locale

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> There are two problems associated with using man under non-iso-8859-1
> (or derivatives) locale.
> 
> 1. There are several special characters used in formatting. I can name
> at least:
> 
> - soft hyphenation
> - bullets used in list
> - right accent (in quotations like `someword')

For what it's worth, I have my quarrels with the current
setup even with iso-8859-1.

 1. There should be only *one* hyphen character in output.
    The current latin-1 device uses a different output
    character for real "hyphens" in the text (char 2D =
    ASCII minus/hyphen/dash) and for hyphens which are
    automatically inserted when hyphenating words while
    breaking lines (char AD). Because fonts usually contain
    two different glyphs in these positions the output is
    typographically ugly.  The only reason one could want to
    do something like that is for putting hyphenated words
    together again, but please, if you want to reprocess
    text, do so at source level, not at output level.

 2. The character used as a bullet in lists is *not* a
    bullet but a centered dot.  This much too inconspicuous
    to be used as a bullet.  Even though it is also not a
    bullet, the asterisk serves this function much better
    (or maybe lowercase "o", possibly overstruck with "+",
    like in ascii).

This has probably all been discussed before, but it's always
nice to warm up the old controversies again.


Cheers,
Tadziu