[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#470844: Bug#470844: encoding issue with spaces in nmblookup(1) synopsis

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 07:29:07AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Filipus Klutiero (chealer at gmail.com):
> > konqueror shows the SYNOPIS section of nmblookup's manpage like this:
> > 
> > SYNOPSIS
> > nmblookup [-M] [-R] [-S] [-r] [-A] [-h] [-B�<broadcast�address>] 
> > [-U�<unicast�address>] [-d�<debug�level>] [-s�<smb�config�file>] 
> > [-i�<NetBIOS�scope>] [-T] [-f] {name} 
> > 
> > man like this:
> > SYNOPSIS
> >        nmblookup [-M] [-R] [-S] [-r] [-A] [-h] [-B<broadcastaddress>] 
> > [-U<unicastaddress>] [-d<debuglevel>] [-s<smbconfigfile>] [-i<NetBIOSscope>] 
> > [-T] [-f] {name}
> > 
> > The characters look like simple spaces in stable.
> 
> Apparently, these are non-breakable spaces....encoded in ISO-8859-1.
> I'm not sure this can be called incorrect. Colin
> 
> I don't see any deep reasons for these spaces to be uncreakable,
> though. I'd rather see them as regular spaces, which would help good
> portability of original manpages.

The correct groff spelling of non-breaking spaces is '\ ' rather than an
ISO-8859-1 character. That said, note what 'info groff' says:

     (2) The last solution, i.e., using escaped spaces, is "classical" in
  the sense that it can be found in most `troff' documents.
  Nevertheless, it is not optimal in all situations, since `\ ' inserts a
  fixed-width, non-breaking space character which can't stretch.
  `gtroff' provides a different command `\~' to insert a stretchable,
  non-breaking space.

Samba might not want to use the latter since it would be specific to
groff.

Aside from all of this, as soon as I get a chance to do so I would like
to investigate why Konqueror is misrendering this. In the most recent
version it's supposed to handle encodings correctly, but even in the
version Filipus is using it should have expected and correctly handled
ISO-8859-1.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]