Re: [Groff] German Umlaute, ISO-8859-1, postscript.

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 11:04 a.m. 16/05/2004, Bruno Hertz wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 16:58, Alejandro Lopez-Valencia wrote:
>
> Alejandro
>
> thanks for your reply. First to your questions:
>
> * OS is RedHat Linux 9
> * groff version is 1.18.1
> * I use basically this vi
>   http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/
>   which is a port of the original one to linux, i.e. without
>   fancy extensions.
>
> That vi version though as well as vim take into account LANG
> resp. LC_CTYPE.
>
> However, I guess I did confuse something. I.e. I thought my
> settings would produce 8bit extended chars in vi/vim/etc.
> but actually the umlauts, when entered, are stored as 2byte
> characters.

Ahh yes. I use it myself, but I prefer vim for troff tasks, not that I be 
the present vim's groff syntax maintainer or anything like it, but do 
forward bug reports and patches this way :-).

> Still the question maintains, wether it's one or two bytes,
> since my vi and vim and emacs etc. interpret those 2 byte
> sequences correctly, i.e. according to LANG/LC_CTYPE,
> why doesn't groff when producing postscript output?

Because Ritter's vi, vim and emacs are locale aware. groff is not.

> Obviously, groff knows what to do with those bytes when given
> the switch -Tlatin1. But with -Tps, the environment doesn't
> seem to be taken into account. Maybe it needs an extra switch?
> Or a macro included? It may seem obvious to you, but I'm really
> stuck here ...

ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 share the same bytecodes, that's by design.

First off, I'd try calling vi in a wrapper script[1] that set the locale 
settings to see if it obeys the encoding settings. And use LC_ALL instead 
of LC_TYPE.

As well, you could try a 1.19.1 snapshot, or wait for its official release, 
"any time now(tm)". Check ftp://ftp.ffii.org/pub/groff/