Re: [Groff] .hcode request with german umlauts inside utf8 input file

[Werner LEMBERG]

> No, it looks like you're right.  `info groff' says
> 
>     -- Request: .hcode c1 code1 [c2 code2 ...]
> 
>     Set the hyphenation code of character C1 to CODE1, that of C2 to
>     CODE2, etc.  A hyphenation code must be a single input character
>     (not a special character) other than a digit or a space.
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This explains why preconv doesn't work.

> Werner, is it a preconv bug that it doesn't produce ISO-8859-1
> (latin1) output where possible, e.g. ä rather than \[u00E4], given
> that's groff's default input encoding?  It stops it being used for
> .hcode.

No, it's not a bug in preconv, it's a bug in troff: `.hcode' and `.hw'
are limited to raw 8bit characters.  Instead, they should accept any
characters entities like `\[u00AD]'.  Similarly, `.hpfcode' should be
modified to allow entities, too.

Please file an issue so that it is not forgotten.


    Werner


PS: A clean solution currently is to put `.hw' lines into a separate
    file that uses the proper 8bit encoding, and that file gets then
    included with `.so'.  Since `preconv' gets called before `.soelim'
    in groff's pipeline, different encodings won't clash.