nroff -man, .An Aq formatting

[Christian Weisgerber]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:

> > > It has come to my attention that whereas with LANG=C "nroff -man"
> > > formats ".An name Aq email" as "name <email>", it uses different
> > > characters with LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 "name ⟨email⟩". These characters
> > > are appropriate, but a lot of unicode fonts don't seem to have them.
> 
> This is definitely a bug, since (as avg@ points out) you can no longer
> copy-paste the name & address into an email client.
> 
> AFAIK (judging from the Unicode group they're in) these characters are
> intended mainly for writing things like <ENTER> and <CTRL>+<F1> in
> technical documentation.

And we probably have that usage in other man pages.  It is not clear
to me if the problem is the use of these characters for angle quotes
or the use of .Aq for email addresses.

A few days ago, I switched my desktop to UTF-8, and I right away
noticed that there are issues with the nroff output.  Looking at,
say, the rc(8) man page, I see that the `...` shell backquotes have
been turned into pretty single quotes.  Again, you can't copy-n-paste
this any longer.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de