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

[Werner LEMBERG]

> 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')
> 
> All these are mapped to characters from upper part of iso-8859-1;
> when you are using any KOI8-R they are displayed as pseudo graphic
> with really ugly results.

groff doesn't work well without patches for non-latin1 character
sets.  This is quite unfortunate, I know.

> Note that nroff (used in man) is already shell script here so I am
> thinking about checking current locale and adding -m parameter that
> would override these definitions. I know how to redefine shc - how
> can I redefine \(bu and right accent?

Simply use the `char' request to redefine a character resp. glyph.

> 2. Russian manual pages badly need hyphenation, because average word
> length in Russian is even larger than in English.  I tried to grab
> TeX pattern file and format it with example of hyphen.us but it does
> not work.  I have tried both
> 
> - literal text (in KOI8-R)
> - translated into \[charXXX] (thinking groff may be confused by upper
> characters).
> 
> Is it possible at all?

Yes, it is.  Please contact Ruslan Ermilov (address@hidden) who has
completely Russified groff AFAIK (I've CCed him).

> Another problem is _when_ to use Russian hyphenation (assuming it is
> possible).  It must depend on man page contents not on any locale
> set.  Is it possible to set extra parameters in man.conf depending
> on man directory?  In this case we could call nroff for
> /usr/share/man/ru/* with explicit -m... that loads Russian table.

The character set of the hyphenation patterns is identical to the
input character set.  This will change if Unicode is supported (using
iconv for all the character set conversion routines).

IIRC, the proper place for Russifying man pages is man.local and
mdoc.local, respectively (Ruslan, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't know how to automatically activate it, though.


    Werner