Re: Latin-1 files in groff

Dave Kemper <[email protected]> writes:

> I consider it a sign of respect for volunteer
> contributors to spell their names correctly, even names that can 
> be
> transliterated to an ASCII approximation.

Agreed. Transliteration is often inexact, which is why there are 
e.g. multiple transliterations of the Hebrew word חֲנֻכָּה. English 
Wikipedia transliterates it as 'hanukkah' for the purposes of the 
title of the relevant page, but it's also transliterated as 
'chanukah', 'chanuka', 'hanukah' and several more. Wikipedia 
notes:

> [T]he letter ḥeth (ח‎), which is the first letter in the Hebrew 
> spelling, is pronounced differently in modern Hebrew (voiceless 
> uvular fricative) from in classical Hebrew (voiceless pharyngeal 
> fricative [ħ]), and neither of those sounds is unambiguously 
> representable in English spelling.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah#Alternative_spellings

So there's no straightforward transliteration for people with 
Hebrew names that contain 'ח'.

The Wikipedia page for Latin-1 ("ISO/IEC 8859-1") notes a number 
of European linguistic communities that have to use what it 
describes as "typographical approximation" in the context of that 
encoding:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Languages_with_incomplete_coverage

This is probably a good point to bring up the "Falsehoods 
Programmers Believe About Names" page, which amongst other 
falsehoods, lists:

> People’s names are written in ASCII.
> People’s names are written in any single character set.
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
-- 
   https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

> Barriers to reading UTF-8 text files are few in 2026.

Indeed, in 2026, >99% of Web pages are encoded in UTF-8:

  https://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/character_encoding/ranking


Alexis (flexibeast).