URL:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65108>
Summary: [troff] support construction of general file name
request arguments
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: gbranden
Submitted: Tue 02 Jan 2024 10:59:42 PM UTC
Category: Core
Severity: 1 - Wish
Item Group: Feature change
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
_______________________________________________________
Follow-up Comments:
-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue 02 Jan 2024 10:59:42 PM UTC By: G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
See the related bug #64071, which aims to do something similar for `sy` and
`pso` requests.
Quoting bug #59442, where I got carried away and brainstormed this.
***
[Something] I want to do is specialize the formatter's logic when
handling file name arguments given to requests.
Presently, GNU _troff_ calls the same internal function to gather an
argument that is a file name as it does to gather a _roff_ identifier.
Maybe that made sense in 1990, but it doesn't today. File names can
contain spaces and non-ASCII characters (in whatever encoding the file
system happens to support).
Since these arguments used mainly as-is, handed off to standard C
library functions like `fopen()`, I don't anticipate many problems here
(O Fortuna, seize my hostage). The only exception to that I can think
of off the top of my head is the value of the `.F` register, which
interpolates a file name. We will need some way to represent this such
things as output. At first blush, it seems to me that we can
interpolate spaces as-is (if you want the argument quoted, do that
yourself in context), and any unprintable non-Basic Latin bytes in
groff's \[u00xx] notation.
I say "\[u00xx]" instead of "\[uXXXX]" because we have no way of knowing
what the file system's character encoding is. Might be ISO 8859-1,
UTF-8, UTF-16BE/LE, or something else entirely.
What would be affected by this:
Requests:
cf
fp (when invoked with a 3rd argument)
hpf
hpfa
lf (when invoked with a 2nd argument)
mso
msoquiet
nx (when invoked with a 2nd argument)
open
opena
psbb
so
soquiet
trf
Escape sequences:
\O5 (but since this is mainly used internally to manage temporary files
by _grohtml_, maybe lazily postponing this in hope that my Grand Plan
to revise _grohtml_ to no longer use a dedicated preprocessor is a
better idea)
Registers:
.F
[snip]
And probably step 1 would be a simple refactor to introduce file name
argument-gathering and -interpolating functions which initially behave
no differently than the status [quo], but simply wrap existing logic for
identifier gathering and whatever one-off thing the `.F` interpolator
does.
***
_______________________________________________________
Reply to this item at:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65108>
_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/
