[Groff] Broken chars

[Jan Engelhardt]

Hello groff list,


I have observed that groff changes certain characters in manpages. I have 
talked about that in Suse's/Novells bugzilla and should discuss it here.

For example, in perlcheat.1, the $| is changed into '$' and a vertical bar if 
the locale is UTF-8.

real:   | (U+0x7C)
output: │ (U+0x2502)

This also to a number of other characters, including the backward apostrophe 
(accent grave) ` (0x60) which is transformed into ‘ (U+0x2018). This is very 
bad for copy+paste, and if your screen font does not have all the UTF8 
characters (especially the case on bare 80x25 tty1 terminal), it does not even 
show any apostrophe, but a block to indicate that 0x2018 is not available in 
this font.

Is this a (big) bug in groff, or intention?



Jan Engelhardt
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