Re: Raw UTF-8?

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 08:58:15PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> For the occasional proper name of an author, use transliteration
> to ASCII.  I consider using non-ASCII-output escape sequences in
> there a discourtesy with respect to the author, because then some
> people will not be able to read the name.

Actually, I would consider the reverse the correct behavior. The escape
sequences should provide the transliteration depending on the device
capabilities. Consider my name -- I would strongly hope that output
devices with proper Latin1/Latin15/UTF-8 support to use the diacrit, but
fall back to the transliterated version otherwise.

> > I use plain UTF-8 instead of the escapes documented in mandoc_char(7),
> > for a couple reasons.  I'm just wondering, is this practice
> > discouraged in any way?
> 
> Yes.  Eight-Bit characters in roff, man and mdoc source code are syntax
> errors, just like they are in C and in any sane programming language.
> The current implementation passes them through, but it could as well
> throw them away, or abort the parser, subject to change without notice.

You know that C99 just like many other modern language (dialects) allow
full 8bit input?

The primary problem I have with using 8bit input for mandoc(1) (or groff
in general) is that it doesn't have a way to specify the input character
set. If that is addressed, the discussion would move to the more
interesting point of transliteration.

Joreg
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