On 22/07/17 21:17, Ted Harding wrote: > On Sat, 2017-07-22 at 15:32 -0400, Mike Bianchi wrote: >> On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 06:19:29PM +0100, Keith Marshall wrote: >>> On 22/07/17 15:06, John Gardner wrote: >>>> ... Can I semi-seriously implore the world to only use UTF-8, and >>>> pretend other encodings don't exist? >>> >>> Not really going to happen, for as long as MS-Windows remains the >>> dominant OS for personal computer platforms. >> >> I have documents, nroff, troff and others (plus sh/ksh/awk/sed/... >> scripts), dating back to the mid-1970s. Many of those *roff >> documents still format correctly. >> >> The thing I _like_ about the *nix OSs is they don't demand I >> upconvert just because a "better way" comes along. >> >> Remember when the "modern" way to archive was to put everything >> onto microfiche? > > I completely agree with Mike!
So do I, but my original point is completely orthogonal. Sure, for those of us who are sufficiently enlightened to favour *nix platforms over MS-Windows, we have that luxury; unfortunately, the majority of computer user's today swallow the Microsoft hype, so lack any such enlightenment. > Of course it would be a good thing to *extend* groff's capabilities > so that it can cope (optionally) with recent developments, but in my > view it *must* keep its original capabilities, and those that have > evolved since (say) the 1980s (which is where many of my own troff > source files date back to). The very reason that I put significant effort into making groff run reliably on Windows was because, in the face of corporate stupidity forcing me dowm the MS-Windows path, I needed to maintain and update documentation for a legacy process control system, which I needed to keep operational up until around 2010. Groff was a much better fit for that requirement than would have been MS-Word -- management's preference, but ultimately, entirely unsuitable. The simple reality is that, if we wish to preserve groff's current utility on MS-Windows, insistence on UTF-8 only as an input encoding is not a viable option. -- Regards, Keith.
