Re: [Groff] mapping of glyphs to Unicode

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear All,

let me remind you what Werner already said on the la/ra issue
about 09 MAr 2005, while discussing "ubuntu, groff and utf-8"

> 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?

For UTF-8, this is the right solution IMHO.  The other choice, U+2329,
is problematic due to its canonical equivalence to the CJK left angle
bracket, U+3008.  It's easy to override this locally.

> It do not think many fonts have that Math Symbols, while `la' and
> `ra' are often used in roff files in non-math context

Really?  Can you give an example?

> .URL from www.tmac uses la and ra
> .URL is often used in the groff man pages.

Aah, I see.  Can you do a survey which characters for la and ra could
be used also, this is, what popular UTF8 console fonts actually have?
It should be straightforward to add a fallback character with `.fchar'
to tty.tmac:

  .fchar \[la] <
  .fchar \[ra] >

perhaps using something `better' than `<' and `>'.

                       Sincerely, Michail (speaking for Werner)
PS. BTW, can you point me to a font having that
 MATHEMATICAL * ANGLE BRACKETs ?