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.
> 
> I completely agree here, there's nothing fancy we could or should do
> regarding input.

Yes.  Note that the problem space lies entirely within -Tps, which for 
now has hard-coded glyph widths.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Sounds great, do you also plan on adding "special chars" support to -Tps
> (mostly for latin1 accents and umlauts)?

Yes.  I want to roll it into the next release along with the chars.in 
upgrade.

Thanks,

Kristaps
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