Tcl Source Code

Platform SPARC Solaris 8

When I run 

man -s n re_syntax

I see the text between CONSTRAINTS and BACK REFERENCES jumbled up with displaying control characters, etc.
This is quite different than what I see with the other Tcl man pages I've viewed.

I am attempting to attach a file with the formatted text in it to this artifact.

allow_comments - 1

Fixed for 8.6; won't bother to backport.

To be clear, I need one of: "ó" "ô" "ò"

Any of them will do, as there are languages where these are all in effectively the same equivalence class as plain old "o". Other accented characters can also be made to work too (but I prefer to avoid umlauts as their equivalence class is somewhat different). If you, or anyone, can come up with a way to make them work in Solaris's nroff and groff at the same time, I'll switch and fix up everything else to work. A plain "o" won't do as having a letter equivalent to itself is completely missing the point...

Experiment with Sol9 (don't have access to Sol8) indicates that \N is indeed the problem, and things are compounded by the use of col which turns a things from bad (problems at the locations of the \N sequence) to worse (whole pages messed up).

Workarounds... use groff or the HTML build on http://www.tcl.tk/man/ of your preference (there is no way I can find to make nroff produce an accented 'o' of any kind - or any other letter - on Solaris, which is vital for the meaning).

Looks like a bug in nroff that it goes so badly off the rails. Does the problem show up on Solaris 9? If so, is it possible and practical to generate the formatted pages there and share them with the Sol8 systems?

I can't be sure about this, but it looks like this is caused by the use of \N'244' to include an accented character in an input file that is constrained to be pure ASCII. There is no other even remotely portable way of expressing it given that the primary market these days uses groff instead.

File Added - 352472: re_syntax_fmt.txt