[arch-dev-public] groff: archaic technology go

[Aaron Griffin]

On Jan 14, 2008 4:23 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at 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