[bug #63124] [gxditview] lacks CJK language support

[G. Branden Robinson]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63124>

                 Summary: [gxditview] lacks CJK language support
                 Project: GNU troff
               Submitter: gbranden
               Submitted: Wed 28 Sep 2022 07:11:02 PM UTC
                Category: Device - others/general
                Severity: 1 - Wish
              Item Group: Feature change
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None


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Follow-up Comments:


-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed 28 Sep 2022 07:11:02 PM UTC By: G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
19 years ago, Fumitoshi Ukai reported this issue to the Debian Project
<https://bugs.debian.org/?182462>.

I took a look at it to sketch the requirements for resolving it.


Something is the matter with groff 1.22.4 in Debian bullseye, but I got
the following to render as expected, except for Japanese glyph coverage.

$ zcat /usr/share/man/ja/man5/apt_preferences.5.gz \
  | ./build/test-groff -k -man -TX100-12

(As you may know from your past contributions, test-groff is a shell
script that wraps groff and sets up environment variables to make it
easy to run a compiled groff from its build tree.)

There appear to me to be a few problems here.  Two are under groff's
control and one is not.

1.  gxditview's default FontMap considers only font with the ISO 8859-1
    (and that of the Adobe PostScript Symbol font).
2.  xtotroff, the tool that generates groff font description files from
    X11 font data, doesn't know how to write font descriptions using
    what XLFDs call the "iso10646-1" encoding.  So that tool would need
    to be enhanced.
3.  The worst problem of all is that, for instance, the Times Roman font
    gxditview uses simply has no glyph coverage that permits the
    rendering of Japanese.  These start at about U+3000, but
      xfd -fn '-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--*-100-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1'
    reveals a font that ends at U+26FF.

While it would be good to solve the first two problems, it seems
unlikely to me that anyone is ever to revisit the X11 core (a.k.a.
server-side) fonts to add Japanese glyph coverage.

On the other hand, we did have the xfonts-cjk package back in the day,
so perhaps we could address points #1 and #2 to incorporate them.

Some might wonder why we would even bother to work on such an antiquated
X11 client founded on such retro technology.

My response is that it might well be easier than the alternative, as
this despairing exchange from 2018 illustrates:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539446

To address these issues we're going to need a little more knowledge and
an energetic volunteer.  :)








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