Yet another CJK-related question

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

There have been discussions before (and I had a private exchange with
Werner on that topic) if groff can be made Chinese-/Japanese-capable.

I do understand that there seem to be complicated issues with the
correct processing of wide characters, and I do accept that the line
breaking algorithm hasn't been set up to deal with the rather complex
requirements of what action is expected when a given class of characters
hits the wall, i.e. the end of the line, e.g. punctuation marks (they
protrude into the margin).

On the other hand, groff and man interact well when Japanese man pages
are displayed (one just has to adjust the locale, et voilà!). For the
terminal, this works fine; not for many other output devices. Now my
question given that I have a huge pile of Western-language texts with
occasional insertions of Chinese and Japanese (usually book titles and
names of persons) which I'd like to process. (bib)LaTeX fails due to the
size of my bibliography database, so that is not an option.

Would it be sufficient to define and install a font spanning the CJK
character range to trick groff into putting CJK characters into PDF
output? For my current purpose, I can absolutely accept if I have to
fine-tune the output by manually inserting line-breaks etc. In other
words, I do not expect to get full CJK processing capabilities, I only
hope to display a few characters here and there properly.

Thank you for all insights and warnings.

Best regards,

Oliver.