[Groff] Bugs in mm, accents, multi-line macros and font glyphs

[P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

Trying to remeber my already forgotten knowledge of mm I ran across the
following problem. (My enviroment: win32 MingGW port of groff 1.17.2).

When using multi-line macros such as .WA/.WE and .IA/.IE, the acent macros
do not work, while using high bit latin1 codes does. I am sure this happens
in other macros as well. See the attached example files.

I also noticed the accent macros in mm and ms (possibly in me too, but I
never have used those) are using the old practice of building composite
characters, instead of calling the already existing accented glyphs in the
fonts (I see this as useful only in the dvi driver and only if there is no
migration to the EC/TC fonts). The problem of fonts with 7 bit character
sets is something of the past, except in the TeX world.

One can argue that there is no real problem, but, no matter how well one
calculates the placement of accents on composite characters, this doesn't
beat---usually---, the good sense of a type designer. As well, the resulting
composite characters are not searchable if one creates PDF as final output
from the ps driver.

--
Alejandro López-Valencia
                                               kenkon itteki
                                   Heaven and Earth at one stroke

lettest.mm
Description: Binary data

lettest0.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document