Re: [Po4a-devel] Bug#480997: pod2man turns UTF8 into "X"s

Robert Luberda <robert(a)debian.org&gt; writes: As far as I can tell, no version of pod2man has ever supported non-ASCII characters except for those in the ISO 8859 subset for which it has troff substitutions (and mangles the character in nroff). Certainly no version I've maintained has, and if it worked with Tom's version, that was by accident. Its failure mode may well have changed with Pod::Simple, however. It sounds like po4a was relying on unsupported behavior, which is unfortunate; I've tried to be clear from the start that pod2man doesn't support and won't support non-ASCII characters until it can output Unicode directly. Pod::Simple, which is the new parsing layer in 5.10, is much more formal about how it handles character set parsing. Basically, the end result is that this is not a bug that I can fix without doing work that I'm not sure I have time to do. I would certainly welcome patches to teach it to (optionally) output UTF-8 directly and just assume that the resulting device can cope; it should be a command-line option to start with. This may not be too bad, and if I find time, I can try to see what I can do for the next release, but no promises there. -- Russ Allbery (rra(a)debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>