Re: [Groff] unicode characters in macro names?

[Ted Harding]

[Ooops! See [***] in-line below]

On 10-Dec-2014 19:50:29 Ted Harding wrote:
> 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].

[***]
I should have written "266[octal]" of course (which = 182[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.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------
> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
> Date: 10-Dec-2014  Time: 19:50:27
> This message was sent by XFMail
> -------------------------------------------------
> 

-------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 10-Dec-2014  Time: 20:29:13
This message was sent by XFMail
-------------------------------------------------