rvpalliende (06/04/82)
I don't know the exact way ov writing accents in nroff. Just a backspace
followed by the corresponding accent may work, but it won't look perfect.
In troff there are ways ov doing this but the resulting text is unreadable.
I think that a standard should be used to indicate accents and other marks.
A preprocessor could be written to translate the readable text into something
the formatter can read, or better still, the formatter should be changed
to accept that convention.
Here is one convention I use with a friend, when writing in Spanish. It
takes advantage that in Spanish the apostrophe isn't required.
Acute accent: ' after the vowel Eg fiance'
Diaeresis (sp?): : after the vowel Eg Citroe:n
This should be changed, because it's ambiguos. Something
should be used to tell when we have a diaresis and
when a colon. The biggest problem is when we have a
diaresis at the end ov a word.
Tilde: ~ after the letter. Eg Espan~a
Inverted ! ~! Eg ~!Viva!
Inverted ? ~? Eg ~?Habla usted espan~ol?
Apostrophe ('): ~'
Problems: Everything is context dependent (But also Hamming codes are)
Some things associate to the left and some to the rigth
(What does n~' mean?)
This can be expanded to use accute and grave accents, cedillas, the funny
circle in some Swedish a's, etc.
Any suggestions? I'll begin with one:
For the diaresis we may use ^ *before* the vowel. This because
in some languages (eg French) the diaeresis separetes the sounds ov
two vowels. Eg Citro^en
(PD In my examples I don't intend to do advertising)