Re: Groff: Revert the mapping of special characters for UTF-8 devices introduced in 1.23.0 version

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On Thu, 2023-11-16 at 23:41 +0100, Lukas Javorsky wrote:
> > 
> > I think an upstream only wants to adhere to the language specification
> > (groff_char(7)). These small differences became prominent with the advent
> > of
> > UTF-8 capable terminals. They have always been visible in a PostScript
> > output.
> > 
> > Imagine you are the upstream and a user sends you a bug report that groff
> > does
> > not behave according to the specification. While another user complains
> > that
> > his nonconforming input behaves weirdly. There is no solution which would
> > satisfy both.
> > 
> 
> I totally understand why they made the change, I just don't see the reason
> for requesting them to put the mapping back.
> 
> I think the right decision would be that upstreams of the packages that
> have the man pages written with the wrong character, should be the ones to
> fix their man pages.

But they *don't* have their man pages written with the "wrong
character". That's one reason why this is awkward and controversial.

The man pages are written with the *right* character - an ASCII dash,
the character that is actually used for arguments to console commands.
groff is converting this to a Unicode dash based on the expectation
that it's being used for something more "text-y", and the writer just
used an ASCII dash because it's much more convenient to type, but they
really want a more text-ish dash. This may be the case for a lot of
text, but it's definitely not the case for CLI tool manpages. When they
write an ASCII dash, they want it to stay as an ASCII dash.

With the 'new' behaviour, you have to markup or escape your ASCII
dashes somehow to prevent groff turning them into unicode dashes.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @adamw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://www.happyassassin.net



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