Re: [Groff] Groff & Eurosymbol

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 09:43 p.m. 22/12/2002 +0100, Patrik Schindler wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I searched the list archives for Euro support in groff and found a 
> Makefile-Thingie from Werner mostly helpful but from last year. With 1.18, 
> the changelog states that the Euro-Glyph has been included. When I try 
> \(eu or \(Eu, I get this response:
>
> eurotest.me:1: warning: can't find special character `eu'
> eurotest.me:2: warning: can't find special character `Eu'
>
> Do I miss something?
>
> No fancy font-fiddling, troffed with "groff -me eurotest.me"
>
> Thanks for any help.


The fact is that Werner has included full Euro support in the Postscript 
driver but you need fonts and font metrics that *actually* have the glyph 
in it.

There are three alternatives.

1. The easiest (as in full of laziness), is to grab the latest CVS snapshot 
of groff 1.8.2, compile, install; fire up your copy of pfaedit 
(http://pfaedt.sourceforge.net/) and generate a PFA outline of the included 
FreeEuro font (there is only outline description files in CVS, no 
postscript outlines). Now you have it all, the font, the macros, a new toy, 
the works.

2. Grab the Adobe Euro fonts distro from their site and use the old hack. 
You may need to use the time machine and travel back in time in the CVS...

3. Or regenerate all the devps font metrics files. You see, the font 
metrics distributed with groff are based on the publicly available Adobe 
AFMs for the "Basic 35 LaserWriter fonts" and those fonts definitely have 
no Euro glyphs in them. [1]  On the other hand, the "Basic 35" font clones 
donated by URW++ to the Ghostscript project do have Euro signs (but no 
official shapes as Werner's FreeEuro font or the Adobe Euro fonts do). If 
you dig in the list archives, you`ll find a posting by yours truly done in 
the first quarter this year with a Makefile that will help you do it with 
the least pain possible.


[1] The fonts distributed with Acrobat Reader do have Euro glyphs but there 
are no publicly available AFM files to the best of my knowledge (but I'd 
love to be corrected).