Re: Special characters

[Deri]

On Thursday, 21 September 2023 14:12:27 BST H.Merijn Brand via wrote:
> $ 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.

I have added this line to the man.local file (/usr/share/groff/site_tmac on my 
system) to 
restore the asciitilde behaviour.

.tr ~\(ti

Cheers 

Deri