[Groff] preconv, unicode, greek and indexing

[Sigfrid Lundberg]

I have tested the new preprocessor with the groff options -K<encding> and 
-k

This is all very encouraging. I have three problems I haven't been able to 
solve.

I've a manuscript of a book containing medieval greek quotations and to 
format those I installed a subset of kerkis fonts (quoting from my 
download file), namely:

Kerkis-Italic           Kerkis-Italic.pfa
Kerkis                  Kerkis.pfa
Kerkis-SemiBold-Italic  Kerkis-SemiBold-Italic.pfa
Kerkis-SemiBold         Kerkis-SemiBold.pfa

which I "mounted" on groff fonts KI, KR, KBI and KB and treat as font 
family K. I used groff current as of 20070518 for the task, with the 
afmtodit as distributed. Professor Robert Goulding at Princeton University 
did a similar job some years ago, but his package is not to be found on 
the Internet[1].

Although it is possible to format everything with Kerkis, I have chosen to 
use Kerkis for greek only, when I switched to Kerkis I used \f(KR...\fP. 
It didn't work at all -- groff tried to take all greek characters from the 
special fonts S and SS. Then I switched font family temporarily using
\FK .. \F[]. Then I got partial success: All diachritical characters come
out as KR, but the remaining are taken from SS (slanted special characters). 
In order to get this printed correctly, I need to reset the system of 
special characters. How do I do that (Problem 1)?

Ironically, since greek characters are so widely used in science and math, 
it might be more difficult to print greek text than say text in 
cyrillic... :-)

For this document I have an extensive indexing apparatus, so I write a lot 
of information with the request .write (and its friends .writec and 
.writem). It appears that these come out in a mix of latin1 encoded 
strings and entries like this:

author:\[u00C5]str\[u00F6]m, P. ... 46

In order to sort my titles, authors, place names I need to translate this 
back to utf-8. How do I do that (Problem 2)?

Finally I have a number of greek names and they are not emitted at all. 
How do I go about to get hold of them (Problem 3)?


Thanks in advance, and have a nice Sunday!

Yours

Sigge


[1] see
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.princeton.edu/%7Egoulding/groff.html



---------
Sigfrid Lundberg, Ph.D.
address@hidden  (home)
address@hidden                  (office)
URL: http://www.sigfrid-lundberg.se