Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle, but... I don't really see what the problem is. Documentation offers readers one language at a time. Sure, multilingual authors might split each page into, say, English or French. But unless it's crippling lack of Unicode/UTF-8 support which stops Groff from embracing the UCS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set> in both its syntax and output, then I fail to see why we're even considering locale-specific anything....
Pretty sure I'm missing something here, though (as usual) On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 10:52, G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > At 2018-12-17T23:45:06+0100, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote: > > > > > > I think it would be better to extend groff to expose the > > > > underlying locale-aware C case-transformation functions, > > > > and _not_ try maintaining our own mappings. > > > > > Indeed. I don't think maintaining our own mappings is viable. > > > It just won't work, there are too many characters in Unicode. > > > > I'm against this whole locale thing. It needlessly complicates > > groff and will probably fail when reading foreign manual pages > > in a "C" locale. > > That's _already_ a big fail, depending on the language. > > > I'd rather have the authors of foreign language manual pages simply > > add the conversion string for that language at the top of the document > > source. > > That's pretty wasteful. And unnecessary, I would think--as Werner > pointed out, these conversion strings could be added to the > language-specific macro packages groff already provides[1]. I don't > know if the man program has to do any work to ensure they're loaded, but > that would again be a better place to do so. > > Your proposal would also put more low-level requests into man page > sources, which Ingo and I (and everyone else who cares about anything > approaching semantic parseability of man pages) are trying to get _rid_ > of. > > Regards, > Branden > > [1] $ ls -1 tmac/[a-z][a-z].tmac > tmac/an.tmac > tmac/cs.tmac > tmac/de.tmac > tmac/ec.tmac > tmac/fr.tmac > tmac/ja.tmac > tmac/me.tmac > tmac/ms.tmac > tmac/ps.tmac > tmac/sv.tmac > tmac/zh.tmac >