Re: [Heirloom] Using the Symbola font in Heirloom troff

[Richard Morse]

Hm. Just for my edification, I tried a few things.

I’m on a Mac, and I don’t know when I compiled Heirloom troff, but it was a 
year or two ago, so something things may be different.

I downloaded the Symbola font from fontlibrary.org. The version I got was .ttf, 
not .otf.

The various things that you tried did not work for me either. \[u1F0A1] did 
work, but that’s because (according to fret, at least), that’s the font’s 
internal name for the symbol, which is not guaranteed to be true across all 
fonts, so you can’t really use that for a “fallback” system.

Looking at the output of troff without going through dpost, it looks like it is 
completely ignoring the character. I tried explicitly setting LC_CTYPE to 
‘en_US.UTF-8’ and ‘UTF-8’ (both in the terminal, and using the .lc_ctype 
command), but that had no effect.

I wonder if troff has a compiled in list of unicode characters that it 
understands, and if you try to use one it deems invalid it just ignores it? 
(This may be borne out by 
https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/blob/master/troff/troff.d/unimap.c
 , but I don’t really know enough about the code to be certain.)

Ricky

> On Aug 4, 2020, at 10:14 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In Emacs M-x describe-coding-system tells me the coding system for saving the 
> buffer is utf-8-unix.  I don't have any LC_* environment variables set, but 
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8.
> 
> I'm not very knowledgeable about the insides of Unicode fonts, unfortunately. 
>  
> 
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 4:27 PM Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:
> Huh. I’m afraid I’m out of my depth then; you might check and see if your 
> LC_* environment variables are set to something incompatible with utf-8 (or, 
> maybe, check and make sure the file in UTF-8, not UCS-16 or something if 
> you’re on Windows), but hopefully someone with more experience and knowledge 
> will speak up…
> 
> Ricky
> 
> > On Aug 4, 2020, at 3:59 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > And if I add "and explicit unicode character reference \U'1F0A1'" to the
> > file, that character doesn't show up either.
> > 
> > On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 2:47 PM Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> According to the Heirloom Troff manual, I think that you cannot just
> >> insert Unicode characters (although maybe if your LC* environment variables
> >> are set correctly, you can?). It says:
> >> 
> >>> Both nroff and troff allow references to specific Unicode characters
> >> with the \U'X' escape sequence;
> >>> it causes the character at position U+X to be printed (X is a
> >> hexadecimal number). For troff,
> >>> it is required that this character is available in one of the fonts
> >> mounted at this point.
> >>> As an example, \U'20AC' prints the Euro character €. When register .g is
> >> set to 1 Unicode
> >>> characters can also be accessed with \[uXXXX] where XXXX is a four digit
> >> hexadecimal number.
> >> 
> >> So I think you would need to use `\U'1F0A1'` for the character to show up?
> >> 
> >> Ricky
> >> 
> >> 
> >>> On Aug 4, 2020, at 12:28 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> (The heirloom-doctools README.md
> >>> <https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/blob/master/README.md>
> >> says
> >>> to ask Heirloom doctools questions on this list.)
> >>> 
> >>> I'd like to use the Symbola font in Heirloom troff.   I tried the
> >> following:
> >>> 
> >>> .do xflag 3
> >>> .\" fp 5 Optima Optima-Regular ttf
> >>> .fp 5 Symbola Symbola otf
> >>> .LP
> >>> Here is some normal text.
> >>> .\" PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPACES is Unicode 0x1F0A1
> >>> .ft Symbola
> >>> 🂡 And some normal text. ❊
> >>> .ft P
> >>> More normal text.
> >>> 
> >>> That's a literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode character at the
> >> start
> >>> of the line between the two .ft requests.  That character does not show
> >> up
> >>> in the troff output, even through the EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER
> >>> ASTERISK Unicode character at the end of the line *does* show up,
> >>> as CPSuni274A where the CPS<name> outputs the character of that name.
> >> The
> >>> Symbola font is embedded in the PDF output (created from the PostScript
> >>> output), and the text "And some normal text" and the EIGHT
> >> TEARDROP-SPOKED
> >>> PROPELLER ASTERISK Unicode character are in the Symbola font in the troff
> >>> output.
> >>> 
> >>> However, if I manually add a CPSuni1F0A1 to the troff output, *that*
> >> character
> >>> *does* show up.
> >>> 
> >>> Any ideas as to why the literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode
> >>> character in the document source is being ignored and not written to the
> >>> troff output?
> >>> 
> >>> I actually have a document that needs to use the PLAYING CARD ACE OF
> >> SPADES
> >>> Unicode character.  The ultimate goal is to have the Symbola font used
> >> as a
> >>> fallback font, which should happen automatically in Heirloom troff, since
> >>> it searches all the fonts when a font is missing a character, but I made
> >>> the example use the Symbola font directly because that shows the problem
> >>> directly.
> >>> 
> >>> --
> >>> T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
> >> 
> >> 
> > 
> > -- 
> > T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io