[Groff] Re: Composed glyphs - quick and dirty solution

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear Werner,

On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > > request to groff to activate an option so that it tries to compose
> > > missing glyphs automatically if both the base and accent
> > > characters are available.  On the other hand I'm not sure whether
> > > this is a good thing from the typographical point of view.
>
> TeX, for example, doesn't do that.  I've never seen any complaint
> about this.  The problem only arises if you want to have automatic
> Unicode support

TeX has huge amount of time invested in 8bit fonts, 8bit encodings,
virtual fonts - and commands to create accents by hand look natural for 
mathematicians who use them in formulae.
TeX is not likely to go Unicode any time soon -
 no major (money) investment and too much work for a couple of hobbyists.
Just a side note.

> Admittedly, `.ps-achar' is not for end-users because it also sets
> hyphenation codes.  Here a user-friendly variant.
>
>  .de ps-accent
>  .  fchar \\$1 \
>  \\$3\
>  \k[acc]\
>  \h'(u;-\w'\\$2'-\w'\\$3'/2+\\En[skw]+(\w'x'*0)-\\En[skw])'\
>  \v'(u;\w'x'*0+\\En[rst]+(\w'\\$3'*0)-\\En[rst])'\
>  \\$2\
>  \v'(u;\w'x'*0-\\En[rst]+(\w'\\$3'*0)+\\En[rst])'\
>  \h'|\\En[acc]u'
>  ..

Will this code work for marks below base? ;)
Why the skew is computed for 'x' and not for accent glyph ('\\$2')?

> > I was thinking in terms of small improvements of the current state.
> >
> > Making groff understand character composition and improving ligatures
> > is not a "quick and dirty solution".
>
> But we are going to handle this right now...
>
> > Adding parsing CC to afmtodit does not make sense, since
> > the only useful AFM files with CC are files form ognkify, AFAIK.
>
> No.  For example, my AvantGarde-Book.afm file version 001.006
> (directly from Adobe, I think) has this:
>
>  StartComposites 56
>  CC Aacute 2 ; PCC A 0 0 ; PCC acute 183 163 ;

Are there Courier/Helvetica/Times versions with CC lines?

OK, the question of composition tables for base fonts seems to be better
shelved until Bruno and you shout military style Go-go-go to testers and 
send them into mine fields of new features!
(A "traditional" style of demining is by a herd of cattle seized from 
locals. Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini allegedly used human waves 
of untrained and fanatical youth or even children.
Software projects often use beta-testers much the same way.)

        Sincerely, Michail

PS. I did not quite follow the developments in hyphenation support.
What has to be done to, say, russian hyphentaion file to adapt it
to the next groff version?