On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 01:35:48PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 02:04:32PM +0200, Jens Seidel wrote: > > Is it save to use UTF-8 characters if a very similar character exists in > > ASCII or can be expressed using groff macros? Think about the many > > dashes which exist in typography. Is it OK to use a UTF-8 hyphen sign > > instead of \(hy (same for en-dash, em-dash, ...) especially as the > > ordinary minus "-" is very similar in the output? > > > Of course there exist transliterations of all these characters I'm > > currently talking about but it would probably make the live easier to > > restrict to ASCII if possible, right? > > I do appreciate that there are a few gotchas here. I think it is unduly > So I'd really rather just support plain > UTF-8 input for alphanumerics, which I think will actually get used. > > Do you think we will need explicit language in policy for this? For the
Ah, no. But it should be documented somewhere and I wondered about this after reading again your proposed patch (and the further info). > This seems like a > reasonable thing to document after man-db 2.5.0, and would cover things > like UTF-8 hyphen characters. Right. Without documentation every maintainer could now start fine tuning man pages using all the stuff provided by Unicode ... > In general, I think it's worthwhile for policy to make comments on > encoding for purposes of interoperability and standardisation, but I'd > be inclined to draw the line at filling it up with instructions on how > to use groff correctly. Does this sound reasonable? Yes, it does. Thanks, Jens -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
