Re: [PATCH v2 00/40] Use ASCII subset instead of UTF-8 alternate symbols

From: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
To: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Linux Doc Mailing List <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 00/40] Use ASCII subset instead of UTF-8 alternate symbols
Date: Fri, 14 May 2021 10:21:18 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210514102118.1b71bec3@coco.lan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d2fed242fbe200706b8d23a53512f0311d900297.camel@infradead.org>

Em Wed, 12 May 2021 18:07:04 +0100
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> escreveu:

> On Wed, 2021-05-12 at 14:50 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Such conversion tools - plus some text editor like LibreOffice  or similar  - have
> > a set of rules that turns some typed ASCII characters into UTF-8 alternatives,
> > for instance converting commas into curly commas and adding non-breakable
> > spaces. All of those are meant to produce better results when the text is
> > displayed in HTML or PDF formats.  
> 
> And don't we render our documentation into HTML or PDF formats? 

Yes.

> Are
> some of those non-breaking spaces not actually *useful* for their
> intended purpose?

No.

The thing is: non-breaking space can cause a lot of problems.

We even had to disable Sphinx usage of non-breaking space for
PDF outputs, as this was causing bad LaTeX/PDF outputs.

See, commit: 3b4c963243b1 ("docs: conf.py: adjust the LaTeX document output")

The afore mentioned patch disables Sphinx default behavior of
using NON-BREAKABLE SPACE on literal blocks and strings, using this
special setting: "parsedliteralwraps=true".

When NON-BREAKABLE SPACE were used on PDF outputs, several parts of 
the media uAPI docs were violating the document margins by far,
causing texts to be truncated.

So, please **don't add NON-BREAKABLE SPACE**, unless you test
(and keep testing it from time to time) if outputs on all
formats are properly supporting it on different Sphinx versions.

-

Also, most of those came from conversion tools, together with other
eccentricities, like the usage of U+FEFF (BOM) character at the
start of some documents. The remaining ones seem to came from 
cut-and-paste.

For instance,  bibliographic references (there are a couple of
those on media) sometimes have NON-BREAKABLE SPACE. I'm pretty
sure that those came from cut-and-pasting the document titles
from their names at the original PDF documents or web pages that
are referenced.

> > While it is perfectly fine to use UTF-8 characters in Linux, and specially at
> > the documentation,  it is better to  stick to the ASCII subset  on such
> > particular case,  due to a couple of reasons:
> > 
> > 1. it makes life easier for tools like grep;  
> 
> Barely, as noted, because of things like line feeds.

You can use grep with "-z" to seek for multi-line strings(*), Like:

	$ grep -Pzl 'grace period started,\s*then' $(find Documentation/ -type f)
	Documentation/RCU/Design/Data-Structures/Data-Structures.rst

(*) Unfortunately, while "git grep" also has a "-z" flag, it
    seems that this is (currently?) broken with regards of handling multilines:

	$ git grep -Pzl 'grace period started,\s*then'
	$

> > 2. they easier to edit with the some commonly used text/source
> >    code editors.  
> 
> That is nonsense. Any but the most broken and/or anachronistic
> environments and editors will be just fine.

Not really.

I do use a lot of UTF-8 here, as I type texts in Portuguese, but I rely
on the US-intl keyboard settings, that allow me to type as "'a" for á.
However, there's no shortcut for non-Latin UTF-codes, as far as I know.

So, if would need to type a curly comma on the text editors I normally 
use for development (vim, nano, kate), I would need to cut-and-paste
it from somewhere[1].

[1] If I have a table with UTF-8 codes handy, I could type the UTF-8 
    number manually... However, it seems that this is currently broken 
    at least on Fedora 33 (with Mate Desktop and US intl keyboard with 
    dead keys).

    Here, <CTRL><SHIFT>U is not working. No idea why. I haven't 
    test it for *years*, as I din't see any reason why I would
    need to type UTF-8 characters by numbers until we started
    this thread.

In practice, on the very rare cases where I needed to write
non-Latin utf-8 chars (maybe once in a year or so, Like when I
would need to use a Greek letter or some weird symbol), there changes
are high that I wouldn't remember its UTF-8 code.

So, If I need to spend time to seek for an specific symbol, after
finding it, I just cut-and-paste it.

But even in the best case scenario where I know the UTF-8 and
<CTRL><SHIFT>U works, if I wanted to use, for instance, a curly
comma, the keystroke sequence would be:

	<CTRL><SHIFT>U201csome string<CTRL><SHIFT>U201d

That's a lot harder than typing and has a higher chances of
mistakenly add a wrong symbol than just typing:

	"some string"

Knowing that both will produce *exactly* the same output, why
should I bother doing it the hard way?

-

Now, I'm not arguing that you can't use whatever UTF-8 symbol you
want on your docs. I'm just saying that, now that the conversion 
is over and a lot of documents ended getting some UTF-8 characters
by accident, it is time for a cleanup.

Thanks,
Mauro