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

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 05:02:38PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:

>> 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 :)

That's a good summary.  Since groff can now handle Unicode input directly,
the groff-specific escapes are probably not more portable than just using
Unicode output.  pod2man still defaults to being maximally conservative,
but with the -u option, you should get the behavior that you want.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>