Special characters

[H.Merijn Brand]

$ nroff -man     < doc/CSV_XS.3 > doc/CSV_XS.man

or

$ nroff -mandoc  < doc/CSV_XS.3 > doc/CSV_XS.man

Used to render up to and including groff-1.22

  $row\->[2] =~ m/pattern/ or next;

as

  $row->[2] =~ m/pattern/ or next;

but as of 1.23, generates

  $row->[2] =˜ m/pattern/ or next;

which renders all manual pages useless

I download the source code to read "NEWS", and I think the relevant
section is
--8<---
o The an (man) and doc (mdoc) macro packages no longer remap the -, ',
  and ` input characters to Basic Latin code points on UTF-8 devices,
  but treat them as groff normally does (and AT&T troff before it did)
  for typesetting devices, where they become the hyphen, apostrophe or
  right single quotation mark, and left single quotation mark,
  respectively.  This change is expected to expose glyph usage errors in
  man pages.  See the "PROBLEMS" file for a recipe that will conceal
  these errors.  A better long-term approach is for man pages to adopt
  correct input practices; the man pages groff_man_style(7),
  groff_char(7), and man-pages(7) (subsection "Generating optimal
  glyphs"; from the Linux man-pages project) contain such instructions.
  Doing so also improves man page typography when formatting for PDF.

  If you maintain a generator of man(7) or mdoc(7) documents (such as a
  tool that converts other formats to them), and need assistance, please
  contact the groff@gnu.org mailing list and describe your situation.
-->8---

I wondered for longer why I get those silly and unwanted quotes and
dashes, but I am now faced with projects that generate useless files,
so I had to complete that task on a system that still had the sane 1.22
and get the results from there.

I bet your goals are laudable, but to me readable man-pages and
cut-n-paste ready output is way more valuable than visual changes that
I happen to not like in the first place however correct that might be.

In order to enable users like me to disable that, I sincerely hope that
the next release of nroff/groff will support an environment or RC
option to disable these translations. And I mean everywhere. I really
want "don't" to show as "don't" and not as "don’t", "~" as "~" and not
as "˜", and "-" as "-" and not as "‐" and probably many more insane
unwanted "intelligent" replacements.

I want an environment and not an option, because I personally do not
want these translations ever (unless I do, and then an option would be
appropriate).

Sorry if I sound harsh, but this change already cost me hours of work
to fix.

I am on the brink of getting the 1.22 source code and install that over
the system package of 1.23, which just brings me hate.

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  https://tux.nl   Perl Monger   http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.37        porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and Linux
https://tux.nl/email.html http://qa.perl.org https://www.test-smoke.org

pgpi6X7vVCOFv.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature