Soften the language discouraging special character escape sequences.

After i improved their ASCII renderings in groff and mandoc some time
ago, mathematical symbols can now be used in specialised mathematical
manual pages like libm and some X libraries.
Tweaks and OK jmc@.

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/mandoc_char.7 b/mandoc_char.7
index f739265a..2c8fe9a3 100644
--- a/mandoc_char.7
+++ b/mandoc_char.7
@@ -35,13 +35,27 @@ documents.
 .Pp
 The rendering depends on the
 .Xr mandoc 1
-output mode; in ASCII output, most characters are completely
-unintelligible.
-For that reason, using any of the special characters documented here,
-except those discussed in the
+output mode; it can be inspected by calling
+.Xr man 1
+on the
+.Nm
+manual page with different
+.Fl T
+arguments.
+In ASCII output, the rendering of some characters may be hard
+to interpret for the reader.
+Many are rendered as descriptive strings like
+.Qq <integral> ,
+.Qq <degree> ,
+or
+.Qq <Gamma> ,
+which may look ugly, and many are replaced by similar ASCII characters.
+In particular, accented characters are usually shown without the accent.
+For that reason, try to avoid using any of the special characters
+documented here except those discussed in the
 .Sx DESCRIPTION ,
-is strongly discouraged; they are supported merely for backwards
-compatibility with existing documents.
+unless they are essential for explaining the subject matter at hand,
+for example when documenting complicated mathematical functions.
 .Pp
 In particular, in English manual pages, do not use special-character
 escape sequences to represent national language characters in author