Re: Latin-1 files in groff

Hi Dave,

On Tue, 14 Apr 2026, Dave Kemper wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 12:32?AM Damian McGuckin <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Moving away from Latin-1 will likely cause serious problems for people who
>> have lots of old files.
>
> I'm not sure what this means.  This thread is about plain-text files
> in the groff tree, which seems to have little bearing on anyone's old
> files.

Point taken.

My few European friends with names which need UTF-8 characters (umlauts) 
have for quite a while been spelling the names in a form which avoided the 
need for UTF-8. Just a comment.

>> I recently was reading C++ code written in UTF-8 and I found it difficult.
>> Very tiring on the eyes because it was more than reading, it was thinking
>> about the mathematics behind the code.
>
> Not sure what this means either.  If your viewer was making you
> convert individual bytes to UTF-8 characters in your head, your viewer
> is configured badly.  If that's not what you meant, can you clarify?

It was more a general comment. Nothing to do with groff per se. The C++ 
code was that of an elementary mathematical function and temporary 
variables related to (say) the square of a variable x were written as x 
with a UTF-8 suprtscript of 2. I was amazed at how difficult the code was 
to read. Maybe I need to start using my glasses more often.

Thanks anyway - Damian