Re: [Groff] handling of composing and combined Unicode characters

[Bruno Haible]

Werner,

> Please always bear in mind that groff is actually a typesetting
> program, not a `man' filter!  TTY output is handled similarly to other
> decives like PS.  This has advantages, but also some disadvantages.
> What you want to do probably needs a lot of `Extrawürschte' just for
> TTY output, and this must be done very carefully since my main goal is
> to have good support for Unicode for all output devices.

I'll try to remember this. (We are not yet dealing with bidi and Devanagari
vowel reordering...)

> >   1) Should the output of 'troff' contain Unicode characters or glyphs?
> >      I.e. u0045 then u0302 then u0301, or u0045_0302_0301 as a single
> >      entity?
>
> groff always contains glyphs, similar to TeX, so you have
> u0045_0302_0301.

Good.

> >   2) Do you agree that the case u0078_0302_0301 should be handled the
> >      same way as u0045_0302_0301? (For one of them the precomposed
> >      character is contained in Unicode, for the other it isn't.)
>
> Yes.  Normalization form D will always applied.

OK, now I have something to work on :-)

Thanks.

Bruno