Re: [Groff] unicode characters in macro names?

[Ted Harding]

On 10-Dec-2014 18:40:20 Dorai Sitaram wrote:
> Is this planned? Section 5.4 of the manual suggests that "almost any
> printable character" can be used, with the exception of spaces and such, but
> I found that even an ordinary-looking character like the pilcrow (U+00b6)
> creates error.
> --d

I'm pretty sure that this refers to "almost any printable character
in the standard ASCII character set", and not to anything that could
be printable from extended character sets -- not even a extended ASCII
set such as iso-8859-1 (Western Eurpoean) with codes going up to 255.

In this extended ASCII, the pilcrow has code B6[hex] = 266[decimal].

If I enter (and run troff using ms macros):
.de ¶
.XP
..
.¶
This is a .XP
.br
extended paragraph

the resulting output is

.¶This is a .XP
   extended paragraph

which of course erroneously includes "¶", and also results in
an error message "name expected (got a magic token)".

So I would say: stick to ASCII (non-extended); and also note
that Section 5.4 of the Manual gives the invalid characters
in ASCII or EBCDIC, of which the pilcrow is one; and states
that it would be "non-trivial to extend gtroff to cover Unicode
or other character sets and encodings that use characters of
these ranges."

With best wishes,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 10-Dec-2014  Time: 19:50:27
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