Re: [Groff] UTF-8 Readiness

[Werner LEMBERG]

> What is the list of supported scripts/languages?

This depends on the output device.  Honestly, I don't know :-)

Ideally, there should be a script which takes a groff font description
file, converts the glyph names to Unicode, and checks the result
against character sets and languages.  Note that the coverage of the
latter is not complete normally; for example, US-English is assumed to
be written with ASCII only, but there are words like `naïve' or `rôle'
which often retain the diacritic marks.

> What about including with groff some base set of large fonts?

Not directly with groff.  Compare this with TeX which also comes
without native fonts but the CM family.  It would be great if groffers
contributed font bundles as add-ons, distributed separately from
ftp.gnu.org.

> Is URW Courier, exteneded by Valek Filippov, that bad?

Well, Courier is the font which is the least usable IMHO for normal
text.

> Did you take a closer look at the GPL extended Times at
>
> http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html ?

Not yet, sorry.  BTW, a nice, freely available font is Gentium -- I've
read that the author will soon allow conversion to Type 1.


    Werner