Re: [Groff] Re: man page encoding

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Since man has to look at the man page, decide whether a decompressor
> is needed, decide whether tbl and/or eqn must be invoked, etc, it
> seems that inserting an invocation of iconv after the decompressor
> and before tbl is also an appropriate job for man.  It seems
> un-Unix-like to build knowledge about the input character set into
> groff, when also iconv exists.

Well, groff is also used stand-alone, and it would be fine to have a
preprocessor (see my other mail).  This preprocessor would be
controllable by man, as it is already possible to control tbb, eqn,
etc.

> I am not really aware of use of groff other than as a backend to
> man.

:-)  You apparently doesn't read the groff list.

> (I have a 1989 monograph in troff, but groff does not handle it -
> too many GNU improvements, even compatibility mode is not
> compatible),

The latter shouldn't happen.  Please send the document to me for
further investigation.  In the last few years groff has become more
compatible with AT&T troff than it ever was.

> Such examples seem to show that putting this input charset handling
> into groff is the wrong way to go.

As mentioned earlier, I plan to add only UTF8 support -- since years I
was asked to add Japanese, latin-2, or Cyrillic, and I've always
refused to do this.


    Werner