I'm doing something that's got to be rare if it's been done before: I'm
dictating a groff document.
The dictation program lets me say things like "mdash", and the output
is UTF-8 (so says file(1)). I prefer to work in ASCII. preconv doesn't
do what I think I want. It produces outputs that aren't highly mnemonic
e.g.
\[u00E2]\[u0080]\[u0093]
I'm not sure what that's supposed to be, but what I'd like to see is
\[em]
I'm therefore look for (if you will) "ffort": something that converts
machine-readable codes in to human readable codes.
Looking at the groff_char manual, it seems like such a translation is
possible, even if many Unicode points map to the same groff symbol
name. My questions:
1. Does such a utility exist?
2. Am I the only one who wishes for such a thing?
3. Is the problem well specified? Do you see any ambiguity in the
proposed translation?
It doesn't seem terribly difficult, but maybe I'm overlooking
something.
Thank you.
--jkl
