localized man pages

[Hiroki Sato]

Marc Fonvieille <blackend at FreeBSD.org> wrote
  in <20071027065754.GA1015 at gothic.blackend.org>:

bl> > Ubuntu Linux uses groff 1.18.1 and has some Hungarian manual pages. I
bl> > succeeded to render them correctly by using "nroff -Tutf8 manpage", so we
bl> > must be able to do this with our groff 1.19.2, too. I'm not sure how to
bl> > adjust man(1) to do it automatically, though. Miklos, the guy, who
bl> > volunteered to do some translation work on the manpages also claimed that
bl> > he could see the translated manpages properly by using latin1 encoding
bl> > instead of ascii.
bl> >

 Hmm, I have not use the latest groff, so I will give it a try.  If it
 accepts UTF-8 and other encodings and there is no regression,
 upgrading our stock groff would be good.

bl> I used to use:
bl> groff -man -mtty-char -Tlatin1 -dlang=fr.ISO8859-1 blahblah.1
bl> which is still working.  Now I'm trying to recall why I really stopped
bl> committing translated manual pages.  I remember I had a mail exchange
bl> with Ruslan about the manual page system especially the mechanism
bl> allowing the selection of the manual page to display according to the
bl> locale.  I'm unable to find this mail, but I now think the problem was
bl> on this point: our manual page system does not easily allow this
bl> selection and the fall-back on the en_US version when the manual page is
bl> not translated.  This should also work with ports manual pages.

 The man(1) we are using partially support such selection by $LANG.
 For example, if you have:

 /usr/local/man/ja_JP.eucJP/man1/nkf.1.gz
 /usr/local/man/man1/nkf.1.gz

 and type "env LANG=ja_JP.eucJP man nkf" and "env LANG=C man nkf", you
 will find the different results.  However, selection of command line
 option (such as -Tlatin1 and -Tutf8) by $LANG is not supported, IIRC.

 Even if the latest groff supports non-ascii encodings, pager is still
 a problem.  Our stock less does not support so many encodings at
 least (I often use misc/lv for non-English text files which less does
 not support).

--
| Hiroki SATO
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