Re: [Groff] japanese kana fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> (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.

I think that .tbz is the same as .tar.bz2 (using the bunzip2 program
for decompression).

>    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...

The default Debian GNU/Linux distribution of groff (version 1.18 or
older but *not* 1.19 or newer) comes with support for Japanese, AFAIK.
I've never used it, so I can't comment on its quality.  You might
check debian.org for the source diff file.

> (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.

While using Japanese fonts within standard groff is possible, you are
lacking the necessary typographical support, namely intercharacter
spacing, line break after any Japanese character except some
punctuation characters, etc.

>    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?)

I suggest you get the *latest* TeX Live CD (or download an image which
you can then install) which has everything ready to run.  In case you
like Emacs there is a special cjk-enc.el file which makes writing
LaTeX documents with various scripts very simple.

Write to me privately in case you need more help with the CJK package.


    Werner