Re: [Groff] What's missing for Unicode support of groff?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> - remove the "charset" section of the font files for utf8 and html,
> - split the "font" C++ class into a class hierarchy
>     class font; // abstract
>     class concrete_font: font;    // useful for other devices,
>                                   // with "charset" section
>     class algorithmic_font: font; // useful for utf8, html devices,
>                                   // without "charset" section,
>                                   // determines the width of each
>                                   // character algorithmically.

Sounds good, but it has lower priority IMHO than implementing UTF-8
input.

> 3) For devices such as DVI, PS, X100, implement rendering of
>    composed characters, for bidi languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi)
>    and for Indic languages (with vowel reordering).  The obvious
>    king's path for this is to use GNOME's pango.

Uh, oh, this has really *low priority*.  Let's first handle the simple
scripts.

> I know that work has begin on 3).

Really?  Please give an URL.

> Since for languages such as Chinese and Russian - "Unicode level 1"
> -, only 1) and 2) are needed, my priority would be on 1) and 2).
> I.e. I volunteer to work on that.

Great!

> > Something like this [Tomohiro Kubota's iconv preprocessor,
> > i.e. 1)] should become part of groff as soon as it supports
> > Unicode on the input side.
> 
> What else is needed to support Unicode on the input side?

Unicode support in groff :-)


    Werner