[Groff] Re: Unicode, EBCDIC, Latin-2, JIS for groff

[Werner LEMBERG]

> My suggestion is direct separation of input encoding and output
> language description.

I fully agree.  But I think that this is already done since groff
communicates with the output devices via glyph names only.  The
problem is rather how to make the installation of new fonts easier.

> The "language" consist also of the following elements:
>    * the direction in which fonts are placed. For example in ancient 
>      Latin it was something like this:
>      ----------->---------------->-----------.
>      .----------<----------------<-----------'
>      `---------->---------------->
>      Although, such strange method of writing is probably not used 
>      nowadays, that are languages where the right-to-left or 
>      top-to-button directions are used,

Bustrophedon...  Well, groff won't support this :-)

>    * the hyphenation schema,

This can be done easily, I think.

>    * the local printing customs (i.e. ligatures).

You mean enabling/disabling certain ligatures for a given language?
This is missing yet.  On the other hand, it is highly font-specific.
Currently, the number of ligatures it restricted to the Western ones.
Maybe it should be generalized (e.g. `st' ligature for French etc).

> It will be nice to have tool which allow complex definition of a
> language support as a set of (easy to write) macros.

I'm not an experienced groff macro writer, so please make
suggestions.  A sort of `LaTeX' for groff sounds like a good idea.


    Werner