Even more Groff/Man-DB Info (Fwd of Groff update, are you acepeting it?)

[William Immendorf]

Oh yea, an update that I just got today from Colin, saying that Groff
1.20.1 has been intregrated into Debian Sid, and that the debian patch
is now reduced in size.

I thank myself for getting Groff 1.20.1 into Debian Unstable, because
of that email relay. (He diddn't know about Groff 1.20.1 before I
notified him.)

William

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org>
Date: Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:28 AM
Subject: Re: Groff update, are you acepeting it?
To: William Immendorf <will.immendorf at gmail.com>


On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 09:46:31PM -0600, William Immendorf wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org> wrote:
> > Don't hold your breath; this is not as trivial as all that. I'm still
> > looking at it on and off, but it may take a while.

I recently uploaded groff 1.20.1 to Debian unstable. The Debian patch is
now quite small and you may not need it any more.

> > In the meantime, simply discarding the Debian multibyte patch means that
> > CJK support *almost* works with current man-db and groff. The remaining
> > problems are:
> >
> >  * groff doesn't know that CJK characters are double-width, so you get
> >    the effect where each line of output is a little under twice as long
> >    as the terminal;
> >
> >  * groff doesn't know the rules for which characters can begin or end
> >    lines (kinsoku shori, as above).
> >
> >  * I think groff is also missing the rules for kerning between CJK and
> >    Latin characters, although I'd have to check that.
> >
> > All these problems ought to be solved by way of character classes, which
> > is what I'm working on at the moment. I'll be sending updates to the
> > groff mailing list once I have something to show. However, in the
> > meantime, you might decide that the above problems are not critical
> > (maybe you don't have many Japanese users, or maybe they can be tolerant
> > of wrapping problems for a while), and in that case groff 1.20.1 should
> > be perfectly workable for you.

These remain issues, but CJK manual pages are at least readable despite
the wrapping problems, so I decided in the end to go ahead.

Cheers,

--
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]