Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ingo,

>  * The playing card symbols are maybe not top priority, but mandoc
>    has them and its obvious enough what to print, so why not.
> +.tty-char \[CL] <club>
> +.tty-char \[SP] <spade>
> +.tty-char \[HE] <heart>
> +.tty-char \[DI] <diamond>

In the context of playing cards, single capital letters are used, `KC'
is king of clubs, `4D' is four of diamonds.  If listing a hand using
`\(CL', etc., it should be approximated using single letters, not the
noisy `<club>', over and over.

>  * The rendering of Pound Sterling seems really bad to me.
>    Nowadays, seeing a capital L, people will hardly think of the
>    French word "Livre" and then understand "Pound Sterling".
> -.tty-char \[Po] \z-L
> +.tty-char \[Po] GBP

No, an English speaker, i.e. British, would think of `L. s. d', `pounds,
shillings, and pence'.  The letters coming from librae, solidi, and
denarii.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
`\z-L' is correct here, and used on old typewriters too.  Please don't
change it.

>    We don't render the Euro sign as \z=C either...

Because it's a recent invention and someone just copied the ISO 4127.
Given `£', `$', and `¥', are in ASCII `L', `$', and `Y', I think `E'
should be the approximation.  That's the rendering for epsilon, which is
the inspiration for the Euro symbol;  a nod to the Greeks, the `cradle
of Europe'.  (The two horizontal lines reinforce the `stability' of the
currency, apparently.)  And again, `E' gives a conformant single column
when mixing currencies.  I seen it used for this reason elsewhere.

>    (I think \z=Y for Yen is OK, Y is at least the right letter.)

And `Y' over `=' the common typewriter representation.

>    So let's do the same for GBP as for EUR.

No, please don't.  It's been a single character and changing that breaks
layout and again looks ugly when there's lots of them.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy