Re: Baffling accented glyphs issue

[Deri]

On Saturday, 26 August 2023 21:47:02 BST Peter Schaffter wrote:
> Here's something I haven't encountered before.  Have a look at the
> attached files.  ps output was produced with
> 
>   groff -k file > file.ps
> 
> chats_1 contains a single accented glyph (î).  The glyph is mangled
> in the ps output. chats_2 contains the same glyph plus an additional
> one (é).  Here, neither glyph is mangled in the output.  The same
> oddity occurs with the pdf driver and with -Tutf8.
> 
> Even more peculiar is that the introduction of *any* accented glyph
> into the source file (in addition to the originally mangled glyph),
> even one commented out at the end of the file, fixes the problem
> with the initial mangled glyph.  Try adding
> 
>   .\"ô
> 
> or similar to the end of chats_1 and processing it to see what I mean.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is new behaviour because I can't
> recall ever creating a document with only one accented glyph.
> 
> Ideas, anyone?

Hi Peter,

I can't duplicate. When you give groff just -k preconv has to guess the 
encoding. So my guess is that our preconvs are different. It can use iconv and 
uchardet for this guessing. What does preconv -v tell you, mine says:-

[derij@pip Chats (deri-gropdf-ng)]$ preconv -v
GNU preconv (groff) version 1.23.0.16-a53f5-dirty with iconv support and with 
uchardet support

It is the support information which is important, you may be missing one of 
them from your build. The preconv man page has information of how it guesses, 
or you can tell it explicitly the encoding to use.

Cheers 

Deri