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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!aeb
From: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: troff special chars - naming them
Message-ID: <763@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Jul-85 13:42:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcvax.763
Posted: Fri Jul 19 13:42:19 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jul-85 01:16:07 EDT
References: <1065@diku.UUCP>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 28

In article <1065@diku.UUCP> keld@diku.UUCP (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes:
>
>I would like to discuss special char naming in troff (titroff/ditroff)
> ...
>The rules: when a letter is composed of an accent and a latin letter
>you specify the accent first. Accents used: ' ` : , ~ ^ maybe more.
>
>Special letters not accented: ae AE oe OE /o /O oa oA (Aangstroem)
>ij IJ ss. The meaning should be obvious.
>
I think we should include the graphics used in eastern european countries
[or, more generally, all characters used in countries where the Latin
 alphabet is used]
(so that a proposed norm will still be usable ten years from now,
 when also Poland will be using UNIX - moreover, people here have use for
 these symbols every now and then).
As a result, oa is not so special any more; in Roumenian one has ou (a u with
small circle on top), so o should be classed among the accents.
Similarly v (havcek) is an accent (popular in Czech).
And / is an accent, not only for the scandinavian /o but also for the Polish /l.
Icelandic has -d (and people doing quantum mechanics love -h),
Polish has .z, Turkish dotless i (how do you represent that?);
Hungarian knows '' (two acute accents, as in the name of the famous
mathematician P'al Erd"os - I use "o instead of :o - this is distinct from the
umlaut).
In Roumenian one also has an accent that I cannot represent conveniently:
on top of a vowel one may have a circular arc (like v but rounded),
perhaps a u prefix would be sufficiently suggestive in your scheme.