On 5/6/21 11:39 PM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

Em Thu, 6 May 2021 14:21:01 -0700
Randy Dunlap [off-list ref] escreveu:

quoted

Just another question: ("inquiring minds want to know")

Why is/are some docs using U+2217 '*' instead of ASCII '*'?
E.g., Documentation/block/cdrom-standard.rst.

The cdrom doc is a very special case: it was originally written in LaTeX.

Yes, I recall that. I even edited it at least once.

I don't remember any other document in LaTeX inside the Kernel docs during
the conversions I made. See:
	e327cfcb2542 ("docs: cdrom-standard.tex: convert from LaTeX to ReST")

In order to convert it to .rst, I used some tool to first turn it
into plain text (probably LaTeX, but I don't remember anymore), and then
I manually reviewed the entire file, adding ReST tags where needed.

I didn't realize that utf-8 chars were used instead of normal ASCII chars,
as both appear the same when editing it[1].

[1] I use Fedora here. Fedora changed the default charset to utf-8 a long
    time ago.

Anyway, we should be able of get rid of weird UTF-8 chars from it with:

	$ iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT Documentation/cdrom/cdrom-standard.rst

I'll prepare a patch fixing it. Some care should be taken, however, as
it has two places where UTF-8 chars should be used[2].

Thanks!

[2] There are two German person names that use UTF-8 chars:
    - 'o' + umlat;
    - a LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S (Eszett)

My patch preparation notes say that the cdrom .rst file contains
"fancy '*'" (not ASCII) instead of ASCII '*' in several places.

Also there are several files that contain U+00A0 non-breaking space
where it is not needed AFAICT.


-- 
~Randy