Re: [Groff] passing groff special chars to pdfmark as bookmarks

[Deri James]

On Monday 10 Sep 2012 06:53:38 address@hidden wrote:
> Is it the single quote apostrophe that is causing the problem, or, is
> it something
> else ?   Were I to pass the string with the french special character
> \['e] it is the
> 'é' that gets dropped and for the word Séance I get Sance as a bookmark.
> 
> Is the string that gets passed after the trin an \[\[aq]e] ?
> 
> The goal is to have all diacritc chars flow through without being dropped. 
> 

Removing the .trin has no substantial effect apart from the appearance of the 
apostrophy in "l'avant-midi".

The missing eacute from seance is due to the warnings you are getting when you 
run groff:-

With postscript driver:-

t.trf:11: a special character is invalid within \X

With pdf driver:-

t.trf:10: can't translate character code 233 to special character `'e' in 
transparent throughput

These both relate to the presence of the eacute character. The difference is 
the postscript version does not action the bookmark until the .pdfsync 
command, so the error is reported for line 11 rather than 10.

The difference in the two warnings is related to the way in which the bookmark 
data is communicated to grops and gropdf. Grops uses the \X escape and gropdf 
uses the \! escape. It seems the \X warning suppresses the character and the 
\! passes the character through. The reason this is a problem in either case 
is because at the point the bookmark is created the eacute has been converted 
to a node holding a glyph name rather than a node holding text. It is 
interesting to note that if you embed the char 233 directly into the text 
(with my uk keyboard) by pressing [Alt Gr] then [e] then [’] the postscript 
driver works perfectly. Try the attached with "groff -mpdfmark t.trf | ps2pdf - 
- | okular -".

I hope this helps.

What results did you get from re-distilling the pdf produced by the native pdf 
driver through ghostscript using your custom gs settings?

Cheers 

Deri

t.trf
Description: Text document