Re: [groff] Regularize (sub)section cross references.

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-12-17T21:36:28+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> My comment was specifically about a character for which Branden
> said that Unicode support is so recent (U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
> SHARP S)

I did say this.

> that the operating systems of some users may not have support for it
> yet

This, I did not say, but it can be reasonably inferred.

> and may continue to show it as a small letter even after applying
> towupper(3).

No.  I neither said nor suggested this, because I did not assume that
the classical .tr request could reasonably be made to expose an
interface to to*{lower,upper}.

I was assuming we'd have to kludge around the lack of such an interface,
and I didn't know how we were going to do that.  Tadziu and Werner
almost simultaneously proposed using .char to define a character escape
to provide an uppercase "SS".

> Even assuming that fear is well-founded, it's a fringe concern.

This, I can concede.  All the German I have, I acquired prior to Reform
der deutschen Rechtschreibung von 1996 (and it has decayed aggressively
since), so I feel particularly ill-suited to judge issues of
orthography.

I will happily refrain from inflicting my poor schoolhouse German on
people if we can get all the darned misuses of "actual" out of our man
pages.  ("Actual" is not a synonym for "current".)

Bernd in particular had a predilection for the construction, "the actual
version is here: $URL".  I was always baffled by that, until I found out
it was actually (natch) quite a well-known barbarism[1].

I think it would be better to extend groff to expose the underlying
locale-aware C case-transformation functions, and _not_ try maintaining
our own mappings.  Nevertheless I value the recovery of distinct
lettercases in man page titles and section names sufficiently to
undertake that work if it's the price that must be paid.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend#Shared_etymology

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