Re: [Groff] unicode support - where to compose?

[Bruno Haible]

Werner Lemberg wrote:
> Please be careful!  Unicode gets extended from time to time, and there
> are high chances that new non-spacing diacritics are added.
> Consequently, a solution within groff must be based on
> user-controllable data.
>
> I suggest to (re)use
>
>   .composite foo
>
> (just a single argument) to register `foo' as a Unicode composite.  At
> startup, `composite.tmac' is loaded, make the registered Unicode
> composite characters `active' (in the TeX sense).

I understand. I would indeed have chosen to hardcode the table of combining
characters somewhere in the source code.

But there are already 418 characters with non-trivial combining classes
listed in
   
http://ftp.unicode.org/Public/5.0.0/ucd/extracted/DerivedCombiningClass-5.0.0d10.txt
Will the startup time penalty to register all these one by one be
acceptable?

Bruno