[arch-dev-public] groff: archaic technology go
Man.... man pages and groff and all this crap are waaay too complex for what they do. Anyway, here's the deal, and hopefully someone will know a better/more proper way to do this. With the utf8 man page changes (pending, see other email), some UTF-8 characters come out a bit goofy. I don't know if it is only en_US.UTF-8 or not. The simply fact is that there's like 3 different 'dash' characters in UTF-8, and the ones displayed are not the ones your keyboard outputs. So searching for "-S" doesn't work. Long story short, adding the following to /usr/share/groff/site-tmac/man.local fixes this: .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \ . char \- \N'45' . char - \N'45' . char ' \N'39' .. Yeah, all those dots are needed... most of those replacements are gleaned from a SuSe changelog, but they work here. Could someone else make this change, or possibly suggest a better way to do the same thing? What we're doing is telling nroff not to use the fancy chars and use the same ones the keyboard uses. Opinions? Thoughts? Comments? Beer?
On Jan 14, 2008 4:23 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
Man.... man pages and groff and all this crap are waaay too complex for what they do.
Anyway, here's the deal, and hopefully someone will know a better/more proper way to do this.
With the utf8 man page changes (pending, see other email), some UTF-8 characters come out a bit goofy. I don't know if it is only en_US.UTF-8 or not.
/me thinks all utf8.
The simply fact is that there's like 3 different 'dash' characters in UTF-8, and the ones displayed are not the ones your keyboard outputs. So searching for "-S" doesn't work.
Long story short, adding the following to /usr/share/groff/site-tmac/man.local fixes this:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \ . char \- \N'45' . char - \N'45' . char ' \N'39' ..
Yeah, all those dots are needed... most of those replacements are gleaned from a SuSe changelog, but they work here.
Could someone else make this change, or possibly suggest a better way to do the same thing? What we're doing is telling nroff not to use the fancy chars and use the same ones the keyboard uses.
Well it looks odd, but it does exactly what you tell it to do. No one uses it for text processing anymore, but that is what it was originally for and thus the reason it outputs some of those fancy characters. -Dan
On Jan 14, 2008 4:23 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
Man.... man pages and groff and all this crap are waaay too complex for what they do.
Anyway, here's the deal, and hopefully someone will know a better/more proper way to do this.
With the utf8 man page changes (pending, see other email), some UTF-8 characters come out a bit goofy. I don't know if it is only en_US.UTF-8 or not.
The simply fact is that there's like 3 different 'dash' characters in UTF-8, and the ones displayed are not the ones your keyboard outputs. So searching for "-S" doesn't work.
Long story short, adding the following to /usr/share/groff/site-tmac/man.local fixes this:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \ . char \- \N'45' . char - \N'45' . char ' \N'39' ..
Yeah, all those dots are needed... most of those replacements are gleaned from a SuSe changelog, but they work here.
Could someone else make this change, or possibly suggest a better way to do the same thing? What we're doing is telling nroff not to use the fancy chars and use the same ones the keyboard uses.
Opinions? Thoughts? Comments? Beer?
Poke poke. Can someone verify this change for me, make sure it breaks nothing? You will need to: * Add the above lines * Make sure LESSCHARSET is unset * Remove -Tlatin1 from the nroff line in /etc/man.conf
participants (2)
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Aaron Griffin
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Dan McGee