Re: [Groff] Composite output regression due to Unicode fonts?

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 09:56:54AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > I've been testing out how 1.19.2 and CVS groff with input files in
> > various languages and encodings fed through preconv.  Using the
> > attached troff output file generated by:
> > 
> >   zcat /usr/share/man/pl/man1/822-date.1.gz \
> >   | ./src/preproc/preconv/preconv -eISO-8859-2 \
> >   | ./test-groff -mandoc -Tutf8 -Z
> 
> Don't call preconv directly!  It will vanish soon because its
> functionality will become part of soelim.  Instead, please use the -K
> switch of groff.

man-db uses a classical troff pipeline rather than using groff directly,
so this is not possible. It also has its own soelim implementation,
created in order to be able to handle compressed files. I'm not sure
what to do about this. The suggestion I saw of having a hardlink from
soelim to preconv seems good; then it would be possible for man to
detect whether this feature is present in groff without the need for
configure switches.

> > ... on a Debian system with manpages-pl installed and with CVS
> > groff, I found that 1.19.2's grotty correctly renders characters
> > such as U+017C and U+0105 (which appear as u007A_0307 and u0061_0328
> > respectively in the troff output), but CVS's grotty displays these
> > as only the base character (z and a respectively).  Characters not
> > rendered as Unicode composite characters, such as U+0107 => 'c,
> > display correctly using both versions of groff.  The attached diff
> > should demonstrate the problem clearly.
> 
> Oops!  This is fixed now in the CVS.  Bruno has optimized away all
> composites :-)

Thanks!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden