Subject: National (european) characters under nroff
From: Kai Harrekilde-Petersen <[email-masked]>
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 1995 12:15:32 -0500

As you probably all know, some of us "stupid" europeans have some extra
letters in our alphabet. e.g. Germany has the U-umlaut and sharp-s (ss).
Denmark has {\ae} {\o} and {\aa} (to use the LaTeX notation).  This is fine
and the linuxdoc package supports this fine under LaTeX.  However, I noticed
that under nroff most of the "special" characters are not (well) supported.
For example, "oslash" -> "o" and "aring" -> "a".  In Denmark you'd prefer
"oe" and "aa".  There a bunch of other conversions in the rep/nroff/general
which are very like this.

Is there some reason why we shouldn't change this so nroff will come out
with the more sensible representation?

I would like the following changes (the Aring mapping was missing, btw)

--- general.orig	Sun Feb  5 18:11:40 1995
+++ general	Sun Feb  5 18:13:16 1995
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@
 <!entity Aacute sdata "A" >
 <!entity Acirc sdata "A" >
 <!entity Agrave sdata "A" >
+<!entity Aring sdata "AA" >
 <!entity Atilde sdata "A" >
 <!entity Ccedil sdata "C" >
 <!entity Eacute sdata "E" >
@@ -21,7 +22,7 @@
 <!entity Oacute sdata "O" >
 <!entity Ocirc sdata "O" >
 <!entity Ograve sdata "O" >
-<!entity Oslash sdata "O" >
+<!entity Oslash sdata "OE" >
 <!entity Uacute sdata "U" >
 <!entity Ugrave sdata "U" >
 <!entity Yacute sdata "Y" >
@@ -29,7 +30,7 @@
 <!entity acirc sdata "a" >
 <!entity aelig sdata "ae" >
 <!entity agrave sdata "a" >
-<!entity aring sdata "a" >
+<!entity aring sdata "aa" >
 <!entity atilde sdata "a" >
 <!entity ccedil sdata "c" >
 <!entity eacute sdata "e" >
@@ -44,7 +45,7 @@
 <!entity oacute sdata "o" >
 <!entity ocirc sdata "o" >
 <!entity ograve sdata "o" >
-<!entity oslash sdata "o" >
+<!entity oslash sdata "oe" >
 <!entity otilde sdata "o" >
 <!entity uacute sdata "u" >
 <!entity ucirc sdata "u" >

Kai
-- 
Kai Harrekilde-Petersen  <[email-masked]>  Linux: choice of a GNU generation
>> Inside every little problem there's a BIG problem, struggling to get out <<
===== Please do not use my old account <[email-masked]> as it's void =====