On Tue Jan 21, 2025 at 8:29 PM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> [...]
[rearranging]
> > Given onf and Peter were generally supportive of seeing UTF-8 in
> > grout, and your defence of it was described as "making it perfect for
> > most people would make it horrible for a small minority, so let's
> > rather keep it bad for everyone", I rather think the consensus would
> > be to use UTF-8 in grout.
>
> Except I can't envision a way forward to achieving it without biting off
> way more trouble in the formatter than I want to. At least at this
> point. I feel pretty weak at the node production and printing logic.
> Give me another couple of years to increase my facility with it.
>
> > For people using an ascii locale it is unlikely their documents will
> > contain anything but ascii so would be perfectly readable in UTF-8
> > grout.
>
> Yeah, but I won't have to go sticking my hand into unfamiliar places in
> the formatter, and we get to keep the output language ASCII-simple.
You could have said that upfront instead of trying to argue that it
would make the output harder to read for some people.
> But it _did_ occur to me that a "grout2utf8" Perl script is probably a
> really straightforward thing to do. We've all agreed that few people
> look at grout in the first place. If those few can be arsed to type "|
> grout2utf8", then they'll be happy, and I'll be happy I made them happy.
Given how difficult adding full Unicode support to groff, and
contributing to the formatter in general, seems to be, I think a more
likely scenario might be that I patch neatroff to support all the groff
extensions I rely on, and switch to it instead.[1] I maintain my own
macros for most things anyway...
> > Keith added a hyperlink macro to -mspdf:-
> >
> > .XR destination <post> <pre>
> >
> > Which I am supporting because it follows the style other ms macros,
>
> The argument order is silly, but deviating from established groff ms
> ordering would be sillier.
> [...]
I've come to understand that it's in order of usage: most have neither
prefix nor postfix, some have postfix, and even less also have a prefix.
It's harder to read when you need all three, though.
~ onf
[1] I already sent Ali patches to add string/register aliases and
d/r/F conditionals, and I am working on adding warnings and
possibly backtraces. I don't know when it will get into master,
though; he seems busy.
