Re: [Groff] An uppercase mode

[Clarke Echols]

On 11/21/2011 09:12 AM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I want to typeset headers in man pages (an-old.tmac)
> differently for text-based and  PostScript  devices.
> For  the  former  I want them to be uppercase, while
> for the latter -- in the normal case, as  they  were
> typed.
>
> I  thought I would prepend the TH and SH macros with
> code that would conditionally (.if n) enter an "all-
> caps"  mode  and append them with corresponding code
> to return back to  normal  mode;  or,  maybe,  write
> wrappers  around  them so as to prevent any side ef-
> fects, like translations'  affecting  various  traps
> and  hooks.   But it turned out that simple requests
> like
>
>     .tr aAbBcC or
>     .char aA
>
> do not work with  Russian  (non-ACSII)  symbols  and
> that I have to do:
>
>     .char a\[u0431]
>
> which  of  course only works with the PostScript de-
> vice, but fails with latin1 which  I  use  for  text
> output.
>
> Will  I  have  to  switch to the UTF8 device instead
> latin1 to achieve my goal, or is there a  device-in-
> dependent way to implement the uppercase mode?
>
> Anton

When I was responsible for HP's man pages, we had all
headers in uppercase, and if the name of a command was
the first word in a sentence the first character was uppercase.

It was a problem for users whose native language was not
English (Japanese for example), and users got confused.

I went through the entire system and changed it so the name
of a command, system call, etc. was always lowercase unless
the actual command or name was uppercase or mixed-case.

That eliminated the confusion and improved usability.  I am
still opposed to making typography different from actual
usage because it's confusing.

It's especially annoying in a world where Microsoft treats
uppercase and lowercase as equivalent to cater to amateur
users.  But I don't like, and avoid using their software
anyway.

Clarke