[Groff] Euro symbol in groff

[Werner LEMBERG]

I'm going to add the Euro symbol to groff -- currently, this will be
rudimentary only since I don't want to add new character sets [this is
up to distributions :-)].

My idea is to have two symbols: `Eu' and `eu'.  The former is the
symbol in the `official' design; it should be part of a special font
so that it is available identically for all fonts.  The latter denotes
a font specific variant.

I think you all can agree with this.

Now the nasty details.  For TTY devices, I'll add it to utf8 and HTML;
distributions will then probably add the latin9 character set anyway,
making it the default -- this isn't an issue IMHO.  Of course, \(eu =
\(Eu on TTYs.

For PS, I'm not really sure how to proceed.  Adobe offers freely
available PS fonts containing the Euro symbol.  Due to copyright
restrictions I can't add it to the groff package.  Is there an
alternative?  Regardless of the copyright, we have to solve this
problem.

I know of three solutions; the first and second is contained in

  http://ftp.atcomputing.nl/tools/printen/euro/groff-europatch-2.6.tgz

written by address@hidden (according to the homepage, I believe
this is Hendrik-Jan Thomassen); the third has been sent to the
bug-groff mailing list by Michael Haardt <address@hidden> about two
years ago (see below).

The second and third solution are rather similar and light-weight but
incomplete, while Hendrik-Jan's first patch is complete but quite
massive.

I'm not happy with any of them, so I suggest another approach which
is light-weight and complete IMHO.

Let's assume that we have fonts Euro-Serif-* and Euro-SansSerif-* for
\(eu and Euro-Official for \(Eu.  We set them up in the usual way,
i.e., running afmtodit on the font files and adding them to the
`download' file.  To connect the Euro fonts with the default fonts,
the .fspecial request is used:

  .fspecial TR Euro-Serif
  .fspecial TB Euro-Serif-Bold
  ...
  .fspecial HR Euro-SansSerif
  .fspecial HB Euro-SansSerif-Bold
  ...

This is done for all fonts from devps.

Finally, the font for \(Eu is added as a special font globally:

  .special Euro-Official


Comments please.


    Werner


======================================================================

From: address@hidden
To: address@hidden
Date: 13 Nov 1999 19:14:35 -0000

Hello,

I have successfully added the Euro currency symbol to groff,
using grops.  This is for groff 1.11.

Download eurofont.exe from adobe and extract the files.  Perhaps
Adobe is so kind to give permission to distribute the file below
with groff.

Copy _1______.AFM to the directory where you store AFM files

pfbtops <_1______.PFB >EuroSans-Regular.pfa and copy EuroSans-Regular.pfa to
where you store PFA files

Change GNU roff's DESC file: fonts 10 0 0 0 0 0 SS S ZD ZDR EUR
                                                            ^^^

Add the euro character to the symbolchars file: Euro.001 eu

Add the following rule to generate/Makefile

EUR:
        $(AFMTODIT) -s $(afmdir)/EuroSans-Regular.afm symbolmap $@

make -f generate/Makefile EUR

If you can't distribute the font with groff, perhaps you could still
change the rest or at least prepare groff for it.


Michael