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

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear Werner,


On Sat, 10 Dec 2005, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > In short - I proposed a simple hack to accept UTF8 input encoding,
> > triggered by -mutf8 on the command line,
>
> This is not possible, I think.  `-m' only handles macro stuff.

I thought to make -mutf8 a special case.

But, as you have mentioned in the omitted part,
it requires too much knowledge of groff internals for me.

you wanted patches - here they are!

1 The encoding issue.

I have failed to find a place in troff code
to plug utf decoder in.
Thus let us do in the UNIX way - 
since groff already lives off a pipeline,
one more preprocessor for dealing with encodings will
not hurt.
What the patch does:
If groff has a -k command line option,
a converter called gconv is called.
If "-K arg" is present, the "arg" is passed
to "gconv".

A sample gconv script is included:
UTF8 is converted to \[uXXXX],
if an optional argument is present - 
text is iconv'ed to UTF first.

If the sample gconv is too simple,
 gpreconv may be used instead of iconv,
or merged with uni2groff to make gcov a binary.

Test case at http://www.iaas.msu.ru/tmp/encodinstest.tgz

2 makeinfo version not found by configure

I have compiled groff-current 
on MacOS X 10.4.3 and 
stepped over the following bug:
my makeinfo reports its version this way:

makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 4.8

configure does not parse the version string correctly
and complains that version is too old
(instead of admitting the error).

The attached patch solved the problem for me.

3 There is an OS called Darwin

It would be nice to include Darwin in the list of known OS'es:

                   Sincerely, Michail
PS. Where do the enriched URW fonts live?

patch-configure
Description: Text document

patch-pipeline.h
Description: Text document

patch-tmac__doc-common
Description: Text document

patch-groff.cpp
Description: Text document