Re: [Groff] ubuntu, groff and utf-8

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear Werner,
you wrote:
> This is correct, unfortunately.  groff doesn't yet support UTF8 input.
> You have to convert your file first to something groff can understand.
>
> Below is a small perl script which does that.  Note that it doesn't
> `fake' glyphs, this is, it doesn't construct, say, `Amacron' from an
> `A' and a `macron' glyph.  Any volunteer for this?
======================================================================
> #! /usr/bin/perl -w
> #
> # uni2groff.pl
> #
> # Convert input in UTF8 encoding to something groff 1.19 or greater
> # can understand.  It simply converts all Unicode values >= U+0080
> # to the form \[uXXXX].
> #
> # Usage:
> #
> #   perl uni2groff.pl < infile > outfile
> #
> # You need perl 5.6 or greater.
>
> use strict;
>
> binmode(STDIN, ":utf8");
>
> while (<>) {
>  s/(\P{InBasicLatin})/sprintf("\\[u%04X]", ord($1))/eg;
>  print;
> }
>
> # EOF

It seems there is a problem with this script.
If there is an `Amacron' in the data, the script produces `u0100'.
But glyphs in groff are named in decomposed form,
glyph name for `Amacron' is `u0041_0304'.
You can see this from unicode_decomposed hash in afmtodit
and uniglyph.cpp & glyphuni.cpp .
Thus your script has to be made a bit longer by inclusion of 
unicode_decomposed hash ;)

And, may be, it is a good idea to replace (optionally, where possible) 
unicode glyph names with
the (approx. two character) groff glyph names, the way it is done in 
input.cpp,
using unicode_to_glyph_list and following precedents  from latin?.tmac.
The reason is to make the output more portable and human-readable.

                                                Sincerely, Michail
PS. Are you sure that mapping in devutf8 fonts (and other places) `la' and 
`ra' to 0x27E8(MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET) and 0x27E9 is a good idea?
It do not think many fonts have that Math Symbols, while `la' and `ra' are 
often used
in roff files in non-math context