On Thursday, 21 September 2023 14:12:27 BST H.Merijn Brand via wrote: > $ nroff -man < doc/CSV_XS.3 > doc/CSV_XS.man > > or > > $ nroff -mandoc < doc/CSV_XS.3 > doc/CSV_XS.man > > Used to render up to and including groff-1.22 > > $row\->[2] =~ m/pattern/ or next; > > as > > $row->[2] =~ m/pattern/ or next; > > but as of 1.23, generates > > $row->[2] =˜ m/pattern/ or next; > > which renders all manual pages useless > > I download the source code to read "NEWS", and I think the relevant > section is > --8<--- > o The an (man) and doc (mdoc) macro packages no longer remap the -, ', > and ` input characters to Basic Latin code points on UTF-8 devices, > but treat them as groff normally does (and AT&T troff before it did) > for typesetting devices, where they become the hyphen, apostrophe or > right single quotation mark, and left single quotation mark, > respectively. This change is expected to expose glyph usage errors in > man pages. See the "PROBLEMS" file for a recipe that will conceal > these errors. A better long-term approach is for man pages to adopt > correct input practices; the man pages groff_man_style(7), > groff_char(7), and man-pages(7) (subsection "Generating optimal > glyphs"; from the Linux man-pages project) contain such instructions. > Doing so also improves man page typography when formatting for PDF. > > If you maintain a generator of man(7) or mdoc(7) documents (such as a > tool that converts other formats to them), and need assistance, please > contact the groff@gnu.org mailing list and describe your situation. > -->8--- > > I wondered for longer why I get those silly and unwanted quotes and > dashes, but I am now faced with projects that generate useless files, > so I had to complete that task on a system that still had the sane 1.22 > and get the results from there. > > I bet your goals are laudable, but to me readable man-pages and > cut-n-paste ready output is way more valuable than visual changes that > I happen to not like in the first place however correct that might be. > > In order to enable users like me to disable that, I sincerely hope that > the next release of nroff/groff will support an environment or RC > option to disable these translations. And I mean everywhere. I really > want "don't" to show as "don't" and not as "don’t", "~" as "~" and not > as "˜", and "-" as "-" and not as "‐" and probably many more insane > unwanted "intelligent" replacements. > > I want an environment and not an option, because I personally do not > want these translations ever (unless I do, and then an option would be > appropriate). > > Sorry if I sound harsh, but this change already cost me hours of work > to fix. > > I am on the brink of getting the 1.22 source code and install that over > the system package of 1.23, which just brings me hate.
I have added this line to the man.local file (/usr/share/groff/site_tmac on my system) to restore the asciitilde behaviour. .tr ~\(ti Cheers Deri
