🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <160@aero.ARPA> kelem@aero.UUCP (Steve Kelem) writes:
>I am using the 'refer' program in conjunction with 'troff' and having a
>problem with accents in last names.  On page 6 of the documentation,
>("Refer - A Bibliography System", Bill Tuthill, Computing Services, UCB)
>it states that "interpolated strings (such as accent marks) must have two
>backslashes, so they can pass through copy mode intact.
>	(....)
>    Does anyone have a fix for this?  Is the original author interested in
>fixing it?

Handling accents the conventional way is a real pain.
I am frequently typesetting texts and bibliographies in french,
and I have designed the following procedure, which also solves
your problems.

1) when you type accents, type the accent after the letter with
   no troff excape sequence, like:

         te'le'phone   (French)
         Franc,,ais    (French)
         Nin~o         (Spanish)
         fu::r         (German)

2) handle all your bibliographies, i.e. pullref, refer, addbib
   ... with the accent written this way

3) just before piping to troff, ditroff or nroff, insert the
pipe:
     |  sed -f ~/.accent | troff

where the file ~/.accent is:

	1,$s/e'/\\*'e/g
	1,$s/a`/\\*`a/g
	1,$s/e`/\\*`e/g
	1,$s/u`/\\*`u/g
	1,$s/a^/\\*^a/g
	1,$s/e^/\\*^e/g
	1,$s/i^/\\*^i/g
	1,$s/o^/\\*^o/g
	1,$s/u^/\\*^u/g
	1,$s/a::/\\*:a/g
	1,$s/e::/\\*:e/g
	1,$s/i::/\\*:i/g
	1,$s/o::/\\*:o/g
	1,$s/u::/\\*:u/g
	1,$s/c,,/\\*,c/g
        1,$s/n~/\\*~n/g

This procedure has the advantage of handling the accents in a
much less tedious way (I can't think of entering a french text
and typing \*'e each time I need an accent !), and of by-passing
any problem that \ could cause to refer. I have aliases that
do this implicitely:

       alias nroff 'sed -f ~/.accent | nroff'

and it has been working fine for 3 years. Interferences with
the apostrophe is minimal, and totally absent in French (letters
that can be followed by an apostrophe such as l n s never have
an accent) and I presume that this is true for most languages.

In fact, putting accents after the word works so well that I
do not understand all the noise on net.internat about the
problems of foreign alphabets. Even spell can look in a list of
words that contain accents in the form te'le'phone.