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From: npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: troff postprocessors for ISO 8859 characters
Summary: Mimicking ISO 8859 with ASCII
Message-ID: <1991Jan3.151843.24109@cbnewsl.att.com>
Date: 3 Jan 91 15:18:43 GMT
References: <1990Dec28.195703.2749@cbnewsl.att.com> <1038@ecicrl.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 21



Chris Lewis requests an additional field in the width
tables to instruct troff how to manufacture the additional
8859 characters that are not in ASCII. Some of them appear
quite easy (e.g., the Yen sign looks like a Y with a line
through it, or the lower case letters with accent marks)
but others appears near-impossible. For example, all the
upper case letters will obliterate diacriticals, and the
Icelandic eth doesn't appear to have an obvious representation.
Is it worth doing half the job? (I.e., should we try to
implement those characters that can be done this way and
forget the others? Do a bad job on the others?)

My inclination is to support two and only two modes for
"production": PostScript and nroff. If you want ISO 8859
nroff, get an ISO 8859 terminal. The stuff about 7 bit
shorthand for 8 bit characters was intended for debugging
and interchange, not production. So far, no one has answered
my previous question: will this direction meet the needs
of the European market?