Re: [Groff] OTF in Groff or -mom in Heitrloom troff...

[Gunnar Ritter]

Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden> wrote:

> shows  that  the "hat" is sort of right aligned above the K,
> not centered as the dot is in the ps  output.  moreover  the
> vertical distance above the K seems different for both marks
> (probably they both are "top aligned" in this direction?).

Thanks. A fix is in the CVS repository.

> what's  more:  the  default  spacing used by `eqn' (i.e. the
> spacing used without introducing explicit white space,  e.g.
> with  the  `^'  command) is markedly different between groff
> and "htroff"    eqn.  in  htroff  there  seems  actually  no
> additional  white  space  whatever  in  the above equations,
> e.g.. this simply does not look right. I confess not  having
> thoroughly   looked   whether   this  spacing  is  somewhere
> adjustable via registers (maybe  it  is),  but  if  so,  the
> default value at least is not a good one.

It seems that this has been a deliberate decision with the
original eqn since its user's guide explicitly states that
you should use "~" to get more space with equations. When
this document is formatted with geqn, the output looks the
same with and without the "~", so the remark would make no
sense with it.

In general, geqn goes more into the direction of TeX and
tries to more automatically layout the formulas, whereas
the old eqn on which Heirloom eqn is based requires manual
interaction in many places. However, documents on which
such hand-tuning is applied would not get formatted as
intended if Heirloom eqn did the same. Thus, I will keep
it as is; I also regard it as a good thing if the two
programs keep a different approach to formula typesetting.

> and   unfortenuately   both   eqn   preprocessors   are  not
> interchangable. another question would be: could the  output
> be  made  compatible  (it  should  be, if `groff' did not do
> groff-specific things in the troff commands emitted by  eqn,
> right?)

It is generally no problem to use geqn with Heirloom troff;
there is not even a need to turn groff compatibility mode on.
The one thing which I know not to work is the placement of
the parts of large brackets and parentheses. The reason for
this is that Heirloom dpost (not my idea, but part of the
original dpost design) tunes the glyph placement of the
PostScript Symbol font to work with unmodified original eqn
output. This gets in the way when geqn expects the glyphs
to be positioned as with the standard Symbol font.

Gunnar