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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!diku!keld
From: keld@diku.UUCP (Keld J|rn Simonsen)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: Re: Re: troff special chars - naming them
Message-ID: <1072@diku.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 21-Jul-85 22:38:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: diku.1072
Posted: Sun Jul 21 22:38:36 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Jul-85 04:58:57 EDT
References: <1065@diku.UUCP> <763@mcvax.UUCP> <1070@diku.UUCP> <766@mcvax.UUCP>
Organization: DIKU, U of Copenhagen, DK
Lines: 23

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Indeed, ua is standard troff for upwards arrow. I would be happy with
reserving char names with the capital letters O U V to be used primarily
for "accented" letters, if we can agree to it. It is better to have a
standard - and that a quite complete, simple and coherent one -
than have names which are the first to come in mind. Oa is a bit
far away from the natural (to Scandinavians) aa, but I can handle
all that stuff in my .tr based .la (language shift or output character
set shift) macro.

.la is a 20-line troff macro handling shifts
between ASCII, British BS, German DIN, French, Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian, Finnish, Spanish and ISO international reference version,
which converts 7-bit input code to output in the relevant ISO National
Character Set Version of ISO 646-1983.
To include other National ISO char set versions is trivial.
The character set shift is done in troff directly via the .tr directive.
No time consuming non-standard special preprocessor is needed.

People can then just write their national characters as they are used
to, eg: {, |, } (for what we at the moment call: ae, /o, Oa)
and shift to ASCII output when needed. And switch back again ...