[self-follow-up] It turns out groff has changed the way not merely `char`, but the vaunted `tr` itself, has worked before.
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=21260e1cd2f6fed6b7798fae6078c4e0270d9641 Once upon a time, you could do this: .tr éÉ ...and on non-preconv'ed input, no less. But not since June 2002. Before that, actually, as the commit above is merely a documentation update. preconv was introduced into the groff tree in December 2005, so there was a good 2½ years there where you HAD to rewrite the above input as: .tr é\['E] You could (and can) still get away with 8-bit input on the left-hand sides of translations. Given that support for EBCDIC CCIDS 1047 is no longer required for groff to operate on z/OS (a.k.a. OS/390 Unix), and Latin-1 is much less lively now than it was in 2002, it doesn't seem worth preserving even that if it gets in the way of GNU troff reading UTF-8 input directly. > At 2023-04-24T11:31:10+0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > > It's a long-standing idiom. Not abuse. [...] > > - It avoids having to re-work existing documents. So did the change above. Regards, Branden
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