Re: [Groff] ubuntu, groff and utf-8

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> Michail Vidiassov wrote

> > AFAIK, opentype fonts have tables of relative positions of accented
> > characters and accents, AFM files can have a section describing the
> > construction of composites.  Can groff use that information?
> >    
>
> No.  It shouldn't be too difficult to write a script which transforms
> such information into proper .fschar commands.  Similar to LaTeX, this
> data could be in a foo.fd file; more sophisticated font loading macros
> could automatically load such a file if it exists.  On the other hand
> I'm not sure that it is worth the trouble.  You are the first one who
> has ever mentioned this AFM feature on the groff list.

I think that relying on such AFM feature for any kind of character 
decomposing is pretty much a dead-end. I know of no vendor suppliing 
such information in their AFM files (if they supply AFM files at all, 
that is) with the exception of Adobe, and the latter stopped providing 
this information for fonts made after 1992 (that would be with the end 
of the FontFolio 4.x series if memory serves).

Furthermore, there is no publically available tool propietary or open 
source (but I haven't looked at the trial version of the DTL tool set) 
that outputs such composite lists in the resulting AFM files, with the 
possible exception of Fontgrapher 3.5 for Windows (a 13 year old relic 
which would do you no good with respect to anything different to WinANSI 
encoded fonts, BTW). On the other hand, it is my understanding that the 
latest Adobe FontFolio 10 (OTF version) doesn't contain AFM files and 
that they are not provided by the vendor. You have to extract the 
information yourself with Eddie Koehler's typetools or code up your own 
tools using Just van Rossum's fonttools/ttx python based libraries and 
utilities, or T1lib (btw, is FreeType up to the task already?).