[Groff] Re: Euro symbol in groff

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > 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.
> 
> Are there actually font specific variants? AFAIK, the geometry of
> the Euro symbol is specified in all details, so I was under the
> impression that there won't be any font specific variants.  That's
> why I added it as a new symbol, when I sent the patches back then.

Officially, you are right.  Inofficially, nobody cares.  And right so.
It was a bad decision to approve a logo instead of specifying it on an
abstract level.  Adobe's designs are quite nice, contrary to others --
the problem is that many foundries haven't recognized that the Euro
symbol is a modified Greek eta and not a Latin uppercase C with two
horizontal bars...

> I would _really_ love to see TTY Latin9 support in the official
> groff release besides Latin1.

This is a political thing.  I've received requests to add latin-2 and
russian which are both much more important than latin-9 IMHO, and I've
rejected them.  Unfortunately, I'm not a fast worker (having only some
of my spare time for groff), and Unicode input support is still a
dream.  Even the revision of the color implementation isn't here.
Sigh.

What I can do is to upload additional packages to ffii.org/gnu.org for
latin-9 support and other character sets.  Volunteers welcome.

> Anybody who can make PostScript fonts should be able to make a
> one-character Euro symbol font by converting the simple outline of a
> large scanned Euro symbol back to vectors.

This is not necessary.  I have PS code for a design of the Euro
symbol, following exactly the specifications of the European
Commission.

> Or do the unthinkable and simply ask Adobe for permission to distribute
> the font under GPL. :)

I will do that indeed, but chances are rather low.


    Werner