Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 10:30:36PM +0200:

> In my humble opinion preconv has to go as such,
> i just do not know yet.  Just talking.

So much talk...

In mandoc, i completed that work in October 2014:

  http://mandoc.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/preconv.c#rev1.9

  "commit message:
   integrate preconv(1) into mandoc(1); enhances functionality
   and reduces code and docs by more than 300 lines"

Admittedly, mandoc only handles UTF-8 and ISO-LATIN-1, and
requires the user to convert files using obsolete encodings
to UTF-8 using iconv(1) first.

The only reason for supporting ISO-LATIN-1 is that many old manual
pages in the wild still use it, most even without saying so.
Otherwise, mandoc would be UTF-8 only on the input side.

In the long run, i think that would be a reasonable direction
for groff, too.  Preconv is notorious for causing trouble for
casual users, see the several threads that were quoted earlier
in this thread, and even very experienced users often get
confused about how it works and where in the pipeline it is
supposed to be, see this thread itself.

"Groff input always has to be UTF-8", that would be a very simple,
fool-proof principle.

Yours,
  Ingo