Re: 1.23 prints some strange error

[Dave Kemper]

On 10/5/23, Walter Alejandro Iglesias <wai@roquesor.com> wrote:
> If I feed preconv with a file already in latin1 (using UTF-8 locales
> here) ...
>
>   $ preconv -e utf8 list_in_latin1.tr
>
> ... *all* non ASCII characters in the output are replaced by \[uFFFD].

Yes, this would be expected to not work.  preconv's "-e" option
specifies the *input* encoding.  So if the input file is in Latin-1,
but you tell preconv that it's in UTF-8, you'd expect things to go
awry.

> It seems that when I call the file as a macro (using .mso list.tr) that
> particular utf8 character (iacute) is read wrongly by groff, presumably
> because of what you noticed.

But that's not the full explanation: *all* Latin-1 characters are
multiple bytes when encoded as UTF-8.  So if iacute (Latin-1 0xED) is
misread in the way Bjarni describes, the same should happen to all the
other Latin-1 characters as well.  The fact groff is treating one
Latin-1 character differently from the others carries the whiff of a
bug.