[Groff] japanese kana fonts

[Erich Hoffmann]

Hello all.

I started learning japanese and it could be of great help if I had
a japanese kana (and perhaps kanji) typesetting method.  Is that
possible in groff?

   Here is how I tried to do it on my own:

(1) I googled on groff and japanese.  There seems to be a "ja-groff"
   or "jgroff" with the proper extensions, but trying to find it
   became a kafkaesque adventure.  I found diff.gz files at BSD ports
   (this is a slackware 10.0), and description files, and then ".tbz"
   files which I can't manage. There was a ja-groff.[version].tgz at
   a bsd port, but after some kilobyte the downloading process was
   canceled. Tried it several times.  It was a bit strange, chasing
   after hints and links to ja-groff and then finding nothing...

   Then I saw mentioned a collection of /dev/nippon device files for
   groff. But I didn't find them.

   It will be my fault, I'm not good at googleing, and the telefone line
   here to this small valley often breaks down.  ---  Does somebody know
   where a kana-capable groff version exists?
(2) Some time ago I made a good experience installing cyrillic fonts,
   using the "wncyr" fonts of the latex distribution and converting
   them with "tfmtodit".  Worked with no problems at all.  So I
   thought this could be done with kana as well, and there is the
   CJK-Latex package.  Werner Lemberg says in the README there that
   installing from source isn't trivial, so I preferred a binary
   version, the tex live CD from tug.org.


OK. I didn't find my way through all those afm, tfm, pk, ttf, pfb
&c. files.  There is "japaneseAFM.tgz", but I couldn't manage those
fonts.  The "afm2tfm" program complains that these are no adobe fonts,
and "afmtodit" generates an empty file.

   Now I have to decide.  If there is no groff package :

   Should I learn TeX & friends (Latex, CJK, Omega - ?) properly and go
on in this direction - perhaps with the perspective of porting the
fonts to groff?  (Eventually migrating from slackware to debian or suse
for this purpose, because there is a CJK package in the distribution?)

Or go a more easy way, using (X)html with unicode?

Or postpone the project and learn the basics of font installing on a
Linux system first?  (If anyone could give me a hint where to begin, I'd
be grateful.)

Any comments welcome.  Perhaps the project is too big for me.

erich