Bug#346095: pod2man: please support groff's umlaut mechanism, e.g \(:u)

[Niko Tyni]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 05:02:38PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> Package: perl
> Version: 5.8.7-10
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> When a man page generated by pod2man which includes umlauts is viewed
> with man in an xterm, the umlaut is not shown but 'Xe' is displayed
> instead.  According to Colin Watson, pod2man has some *roff code that
> tries to manually place the umlaut.  It would be nice if pod2man would
> support the predefined :u input character.

I believe Russ (as the pod2man upstream maintainer) is not willing
to make it output groff specific sequences by default for portability
reasons. Even doing this as a Debian-specific change would mean that
other systems could not read the Debian manpages.

Invoking pod2man with the --utf8 option (present since Lenny) makes
it generate raw utf8, which should work fine on Debian (modulo POD
documents with a wrong or missing =encoding.)

See also 
 http://bugs.debian.org/492037
 http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2008-06/002.html .

I think Russ is getting this too so I'm sure he'll speak up if he's
got something to add :)
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org