James Lin
I am having issues displaying Chinese manpage with encodings: UTF-8, GB2312 and GB18030 when using nroff -man
When I vi it, I can see the encoding fine, but by using nroff -man, all I see is garble.
groff-1.18.1.1 which we currently have in openSUSE 10.3 doesn't
support any multibyte encodings *except* the Japanese encoding
EUC-JP. It supports EUC-JP only because it contains a patch to support
Japanese which is also used in Debian.
This patch is not in the upstream groff though and it doesn't make
much sense to include that patch upstream because this patch is
not generic and only helps for Japanese.
The latest version of upstream groff already has some support for
UTF-8 though. But that alone doesn't imply that Japanese and Chinese
is supported, to support Japanese and Chinese properly, not only
support for a suitable encoding is required but also special
formatting support (Japanese and Chinese don't have spaces between
words, therefore you need different line breaking rules than in
English). As far as I know, the latest upstream groff doesn't support
proper formatting for Chinese and Japanese yet.
I'll check out the latest groff again and see whether it makes
sense to update.
--
Mike FABIAN