Re: [Groff] Re: Bug#552201: groff-base: Japanese manpages are shown with too wide spaces

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> the `classes' keyword for font files, ...
> 
> What is the keyword supposed to work?  I didn't notice that since it
> is currently not used in any font file and seems not to affect the
> run-time behavior.  Perhaps a wreck of the original patch?

The `classes' keyword should help reduce the size of non-TTY font
description files of CJK fonts: Instead of thousands of lines in the
`charset' section for glyphs from the CJK range(s), you just have a
single one, something like

  classes
  [CJK]  u4E00-u9FFF

  charset
  ...
  [CJK]  1000,800,200  3  ?  ?

However, the two question marks indicate that I don't know how to
handle those fields.  Perhaps it should be something like

  [CJK]  1000,800,200  3  %d  uni%X

to programmatically derive the index value for \N'...' (field 4) and
the PS glyph name for grops (field 5), but this isn't implemented yet.

So please ignore the `classes' keyword documentation; I'll remove the
corresponding code, to be postponed for later.  Alternatively, you
might add the missing bits right now :-)

Besides that, it is an interesting question how to support Japanese
fonts for CJK characters.  In my CJK package for LaTeX, I've used
active characters to activate CJK fonts for CJK characters.  For
groff, the probably easiest method is to register, say, a Japanese
font as `special' using either `.fspecial' or `.special'.  Then any
glyph not found in the current (latin) font is taken from the fspecial
or special list.

Note that I can't remember how this has been solved in the old Debian
extension for Japanese...

> I'm now trying to extend current ja.tmac to support Chinese and Korean:
> http://ueno.fedorapeople.org/groff/make-cjk-tmac/

Very nice!


    Werner