Re: First impressions: strange groff default font behaviour after system upgrade

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Branden,

thank you for your quick response!

I had just hit the send button, and the bell rang --- I saw T. Kurt
Bond's incoming mail. What a coincidence.

On 18/12/2023 22:07, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> At 2023-12-18T21:57:07+0100, Oliver Corff wrote:
> > Enter groff 1.23.0. I compiled the same file again (a translation which
> > I had finished just this morning, not knowing what an escape I had*),
> > and alas! things took an unexpected course. First I looked for the
> > appearance of  ≤ and was astonished to see that not only was it
> > invisible, it was truly invisible as no placeholder box appeared; blank
> > space was there, at least. Then I noticed strange holes in the text ---
> > the Greek letters did not show up either. Again, no placeholder box,
> > just white space.
> >
> > So, this is a brand-new Fedora 39 installation with groff version
> > 1.23.0, the URW fonts being found in /usr/share/fons/urw-base35/.
> >
> > My first question: Is this new behaviour intended?
> Probably not.  Oddly, not much earlier today, we got a similar report
> from T. Kurt Bond about the URW fonts being troublesome--as in, not
> found--in a groff build from source on Fedora 39.
>
> So something would appear to be amiss.  I'm hoping Deri can help us
> figure it out.
>
> > If so, what I am I supposed to do?
> >
> > If not, what kind of tests and diagnostics should I conduct?
> >
> > If I compile a minimal ms document like
> >
> > .PP
> > 1≤2
> >
> > I can copy and paste the white space between 1 and 2 from the resulting
> > pdf document, and lo and behold, it is a "≤" !
> Your copy and paste operation is going through the PDF's "CMap" feature,
> which narrows things down a little.  Maybe the font needs to be embedded
> but it isn't?  I'm just stabbing in the dark here.  gropdf's `-e` option
> will embed all fonts.  If that fixes the problem, then the issue would
> appear to be that the PDF _viewer_ programs on Fedora 39 are not finding
> the URW fonts, not that groff isn't.
I tried to compile my minimal document again, with all combinations of
-e, -F /usr/share/fonts/urw35-base/ but nothing changes. The PDF file is
always 11771 bytes long. Embedding a font or a glyph should make a
difference, or not?

On the other hand, I ran $ pdftotext mychar.pdf and it showed "1≤2". So
the character is definitely there. However, when starting evince I get
the message

Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket
/root/.cache/at-spi/bus_0: Permission denied

Never seen this before, I even do not know what at-spi is.

Same with okular.

This prompted me to send the pdf to a different device, and voilà! there
everything shows up as intended!

groff 1.23.0 is acquitted. That's good news.

> > And, as a side-note, there is a typo in refer(1), right in the first
> > line(2) of ther first contiguous paragraph: "a preprocessor that
> > prepares bibilographic citations".
> Since fixed.  Expect the correct spelling in groff 1.24.
>
> commit 306441e44693a503eb12df483f59f68844d205d6
> Author:     G. Branden Robinson<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
> AuthorDate: Tue Sep 12 04:25:48 2023 -0500

Thank you for that. But who am I to complain about orthography, given
the many gaffes which sneak into my emails (simply because I am not
patient enough to carefully read *before* hitting the send button).

Best, Oliver.


> Regards,
> Branden

--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
GERMANY
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de