Re: First impressions: strange groff default font behaviour after system upgrade

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Oliver,

At 2023-12-18T21:57:07+0100, Oliver Corff wrote:
> Enter groff 1.23.0. I compiled the same file again (a translation which
> I had finished just this morning, not knowing what an escape I had*),
> and alas! things took an unexpected course. First I looked for the
> appearance of  ≤ and was astonished to see that not only was it
> invisible, it was truly invisible as no placeholder box appeared; blank
> space was there, at least. Then I noticed strange holes in the text ---
> the Greek letters did not show up either. Again, no placeholder box,
> just white space.
> 
> So, this is a brand-new Fedora 39 installation with groff version
> 1.23.0, the URW fonts being found in /usr/share/fons/urw-base35/.
> 
> My first question: Is this new behaviour intended?

Probably not.  Oddly, not much earlier today, we got a similar report
from T. Kurt Bond about the URW fonts being troublesome--as in, not
found--in a groff build from source on Fedora 39.

So something would appear to be amiss.  I'm hoping Deri can help us
figure it out.

> If so, what I am I supposed to do?
> 
> If not, what kind of tests and diagnostics should I conduct?
> 
> If I compile a minimal ms document like
> 
> .PP
> 1≤2
> 
> I can copy and paste the white space between 1 and 2 from the resulting
> pdf document, and lo and behold, it is a "≤" !

Your copy and paste operation is going through the PDF's "CMap" feature,
which narrows things down a little.  Maybe the font needs to be embedded
but it isn't?  I'm just stabbing in the dark here.  gropdf's `-e` option
will embed all fonts.  If that fixes the problem, then the issue would
appear to be that the PDF _viewer_ programs on Fedora 39 are not finding
the URW fonts, not that groff isn't.

> And, as a side-note, there is a typo in refer(1), right in the first
> line(2) of ther first contiguous paragraph: "a preprocessor that
> prepares bibilographic citations".

Since fixed.  Expect the correct spelling in groff 1.24.

commit 306441e44693a503eb12df483f59f68844d205d6
Author:     G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Tue Sep 12 04:25:48 2023 -0500

Regards,
Branden

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