Andries,
> It is not at all an unimportant detail whether it changes to utf-8 or
> ascii with escape sequences. My own preprocessors halfway that pipeline
> do not know about utf-8, and do not know about these escape sequences
> either. Still I am told that compatibility mode should work.
?? What is the relation between groff's compatibility mode and the
possibility that your own preprocessors cannot handle non-ASCII troff input
in either form?
> Is it not far simpler to document that groff must be called with a file
> coded in ASCII or Latin-1 or UTF-8?
If we did this,
1) We would need a heuristic to decide whether a given file is Latin1
or UTF-8. And "heuristic" is equivalent to "bug by design". Better
avoid it.
2) We would have low acceptance from the people who produce man pages in
EUC-JP, with the consequence that these "-Tnippon" hacks in groff
(or equivalent hacks in "man" in some distributions) would need to stay
forever.
Bruno
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