Re: Raw UTF-8?

[Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>]

> This also works fine with FreeBSD's groff when rendering to UTF-8 aware
> terminals using -Tutf8 (and of course in -Tps and -Thtml mode).
> 
> I really hope the sentiment expressed in this thread is in jest, as I
> would stop considering mandoc(1) a viable alternative for FreeBSD's man
> subsystem if it will never support UTF-8 output (and then render \(:o as
> ö like it should).

I think there's a little confusion here.  I see Ingo just wrote and 
answered most questions.  Well, no point in wasting a response...

The state of affairs follows:

  - mandoc/groff accept and understand ASCII input
  - mandoc/groff [sometimes] accept but DO NOT understand non-ASCII input

That UTF-8 input renders on your screen is coincidence: you happen to 
have a UTF-8 terminal and groff hasn't puked on the characters.  You 
implicitly assume your readers' mediums have the same capabilities.

Now for the \[foo] syntax.  First, it exists.  Second, it covers most 
European characters.  Is it general?  No.  Why let it stay?  Because it 
lets \(:u be both "u" (my terminal) and ü (e.g. www output).  If you 
don't use the \[foo] escapes, you're screwing readers.  Yes, we're 
screwing non-western-European manual writers ("me") already, but this is 
not a problem we need to solve right now.

Now for output and The Good Stuff.

-Tutf8 is not hard.  I think I can manage this in coming releases 
without any negative effects.  In fact, it will cut the binary size, as 
I'd key special chars as integers and rewrite them on the fly into 
UTF-8, Latin-1, or whatever, for all outputs.

Thanks,

Kristaps
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