Re: [Groff] opentype and postscript fonts

[Pierre-Jean]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> This is not true; Gunnar is actively maintaining heirloom troff.
> ...
> > - Which are the defaults of heirloom troff?
> This question is too vague.  IIRC, Gunnar is reading this list (it's
> essentially the only list for troff and friends), so he may answer.
> ...
> > - Why not integrating heirloom troff advantages inside groff?
>
> Patches are highly welcomed.  I simply have not enough time to do that
> by myself.

It makes me feel uncomfortable to think I could have
deprecated your both work. It was not my intention.

I'm a fan of Mr Ritter's work: I've discovered *roff in the
heirloom web page (before that day I thought it was only a
manpage viewer), I'm using its mailx everyday, and I
generaly think that the heirloom project is one of the most
beautifull opensource project: It's not only a technical
project, but also an aesthetic one.

Since that discovery (only a few month ago) I'm using groff,
mostly because of the sympathy of this mailing list, and the
ability to meet it's maintainers here. You give to the old
*roff the strength of a young project.


> [...]
>
> > But the solution explained here doesn't work for Groff.  I've tried
> > to make a font with small caps, using the "-fsmcp" option.  With
> > fontforge, I've looked at the pfd file:
> > - It has got small caps and normal letters.
> > - The small caps are named "a.smcp" where the normals letters are
> >   named "a".
>
> Here is the problem, I think.  To use `a.smcp' instead of `a', you
> have to make groff aware of that with code like this:
>
>   .char a \[a.smcp]
>   .char b \[b.smcp]
>   ...
>
> assuming that after using the `afmtodit' program those glyph names are
> in the groff font file.
>

Thanks, you're right.

The groff font file is truncated: the name of the special
letters (small caps, old style number...) is not mentionned,
(replaced by ---) but they are present, and described in the
entity name field.

One can repair the groff font file using that sed
expression (if first field is "---", it is replaced it by
the fourth one):
sed -i -e "
s/---\t\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)\t\(.*\)/\4\t\1\t\2\t\3\t\4/" \
groff_font_file

Then we can use \[glyph_name] 

I'll make some tests and post a complete "how-to use opentype
fonts" on the list.

Thanks a lot!

Pierre-Jean.