Re: [Groff] arrowup

[Ted Harding]

On 10-Jun-10 21:01:34, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
>> So either something has changed the numerical encoding of \[ua]
>> in groff (but despite searching I have found no clue), or possibly
>> the input characters "\[ua]" were mis-interpreted as "\[uA]".
>> Could this have something to do with locale?
> 
> I don't believe it has do do with locale.  I get the same with
> groff 1.18.1 on SuSE 11.1.  It's probably a bug in grops,
> because if you look at the intermediate file you'll notice that
> it's still correct.  And it's somehow related to the name "ua",
> because if you edit .../font/devps/S and rename "ua" to "aa" and
> "uA" to "aA" and make the corresponding changes in your input
> file, then it works as it should.

Excellent detective work, Tadziu!
Following that up, here are the results of tests which agree with
what you say (the text-writing part of the grops output being shown):

[1]
echo "\\[da]" | troff -Tps
  ==> DFd
      Cda

echo "\\[da]" | troff -Tps | grops

  ==> /F0 10/Symbol SF<af>72 12 Q 0 Cg EP

Here "<af>"[hex] --> "0257"[oct] which is the code in .../devps/S
for the character "\[da]", as it should be, and agrees with the
"Cda" output from troff.

[2]
echo "\\[ua]" | troff -Tps
  ==> DFd
      Cua

echo "\\[ua]" | troff -Tps | grops
  ==> /F0 10/Symbol SF<dd>72 12 Q 0 Cg EP

And here "<dd>"[hex] --> "335"[oct] which is the code for "\[uA]",
not for "\[ua]" (which has code "255"[oct] = "<ad>"[hex].

It is interesting that you are able to get grops to do the right
thing by changing "\[ua]" to "\[aa]", i.e. by altering the first
character of "ua"!

Not that it's that major a problem, since "\fS\N'173'\fP" works,
and is not a lot of extra trouble to type:

echo "\\fS\\N'173'\\fP" | troff -Tps
  ==> DFd
      N173

echo "\\fS\\N'173'\\fP" | troff -Tps
  ==> /F0 10/Symbol SF<ad>72 12 Q 0 Cg EP

which is as it should be (see [2]). This Debian Etch dates from 2007.

I also have groff 1.18.1 on an older machine (Red Hat 9 Linux, 2003)
and on a more recent machine (Debian Lenny 2008), and again both
show this error. So, between your SuSE and my Debians and Red Hat,
it seems to be independent of the Linux distribution (as we know,
sometimes groff can be conpiled differently on different distros).

Thanks!
Ted.

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Date: 10-Jun-10                                       Time: 23:11:15
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