[tex-live] Encoding of files in Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/man1

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I'm confused with encoding of files in
> Master/texmf-dist/doc/man/man{1,5}.  I checked encoding of them and
> found as following:
>

> a2ping.1, kpsewhere.1, latex2man.1, mkjobtexmf.1, thumbpdf.1 :
>   Latin1 (iso-8859-1)
> findhyph.1, luaotfload-tool.1, mendex.1, luaotfload.conf.5 : UTF-8
> others : ASCII

This is a known issue.  Karl is working on it.

> Is there any reason to keep mixture of file encoding?

Well, TeXLive takes whatever is delivered to CTAN.  It's a bad idea
IMHO to modify the files in TeXLive only; instead, the authors should
fix this.

The good news: The next groff version uses the `uchardet' library to
improve the heuristics for identifying a man page's character encoding
in case an encoding tag (using the Emacs style) is missing.  The bad
news: It will take some more weeks until this version (1.22.4) gets
released.

Until then it would be an excellent idea if man pages not encoded in
latin-1 (or ASCII) get tagged with

  .\" -*- mode: troff; coding: <encoding> -*-

as the first (or second) line; <encoding> could be, for example,
`utf-8'.  Invoking

  groff -k ...

would then automatically convert the man page to something groff can
understand.


    Werner