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

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear Werner,

I have tested unicode support in groff and stepped over a bug (IMHO).
1. I have converted a font MyriadPro-Regular from Acrobat Reader 7
to pfa+afm by fontforge and afm to groff font description by afmtodit.
Font is named MPR, encoded with groff encoding and set to be downloaded by 
groff.
2. when I typeset the following
\f[MPR]$.\[u00A2].\[u00A3].\[u2265].\[u0100].\[u00C4].\[u1EA2].\[u00C5].\[u0114].\fP
 
\f[MPR]$\[u00A2]\[u00A3]\[u2265]\[u0100]\[u00C4]\[u1EA2]\[u00C5]\[u0114]\fPeverything
 comes out fine, but when the order of lines is changed someglyphs appearas 
crssed box (undefined glyph?) 
\f[MPR]$\[u00A2]\[u00A3]\[u2265]\[u0100]\[u00C4]\[u1EA2]\[u00C5]\[u0114]\fP 
\f[MPR]$.\[u00A2].\[u00A3].\[u2265].\[u0100].\[u00C4].\[u1EA2].\[u00C5].\[u0114].\fPTested
 with groff 1.9.2, ghostscript and HP LaserJet 1300.Test case is at 
http://www.iaas.msu.ru/tmp/unicodetest.tgz3. Some other bugs:afmtodit needs a 
patch, since we do not encode variant glyphs with ps namessmth.smth,but they 
may be present in kerning tables.BTW, why not to encode them as, say, 
uXXXX.capgrops(1) tells A downloadable font should not include  its  own name 
in a%%DocumentSuppliedResources comment.But the FreeEuro font does not follow 
this convention.             Sincerely, MichailPS. Have you started to work on 
real Uicode input?!
Context:you wrote  September 08, 2005 7:56 PMSubject: Re: What's missing for Unicode support of groff?>> > What exactly do you mean?  Converting UTF-8 to, say, latin-1 with>> > `iconv' is 
already a quick-and-dirty solution.  Another>> > possibility is to take a groff UTF8 font definition file and put>> > all Unicode->glyph entities into a big perl (or python) 
table.>>>> I mean that you had an idea to use a small filter to>> # Convert input in UTF8 encoding to something groff 1.19 or greater>> # can understand.  It simply converts all Unicode 
values >= U+0080>> # to the form \[uXXXX].>> You posted  "a small perl script which does that">> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-02/msg00094.html),>> that was 
later rewritten in C>> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-06/msg00025.html).>> That seems to be a way to let people start to convert documents>> in latin or cyrillic encodings, if 
they want to move to UTF-only>> environment.>> Indeed.  It might be a good i!
dea to put such stuff into the `contrib'> directory of http://groff.ff
ii.org.  Do you volunteer to provide> documentation, examples, etc., to make those 
scripts/programs really> useful?>> I hesitate to put it into the groff distribution 
directly.  Now 1.19.2> is out, and work on real UTF8 input could start.>