Re: user-defined characters, translation maps, and environment binding

[G. Branden Robinson]

[self-follow-up]

It turns out groff has changed the way not merely `char`, but the
vaunted `tr` itself, has worked before.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=21260e1cd2f6fed6b7798fae6078c4e0270d9641

Once upon a time, you could do this:

.tr éÉ

...and on non-preconv'ed input, no less.

But not since June 2002.  Before that, actually, as the commit above is
merely a documentation update.

preconv was introduced into the groff tree in December 2005, so there
was a good 2½ years there where you HAD to rewrite the above input as:

.tr é\['E]

You could (and can) still get away with 8-bit input on the left-hand
sides of translations.  Given that support for EBCDIC CCIDS 1047 is no
longer required for groff to operate on z/OS (a.k.a. OS/390 Unix), and
Latin-1 is much less lively now than it was in 2002, it doesn't seem
worth preserving even that if it gets in the way of GNU troff reading
UTF-8 input directly.

> At 2023-04-24T11:31:10+0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> > It's a long-standing idiom.  Not abuse.
[...]
> > - It avoids having to re-work existing documents.

So did the change above.

Regards,
Branden

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