[groff] -ms(pdf) and Unicode

[Bernhard Fisseni]

Good evening,

I was playing with pandoc's ms and man writer.  The text had some
non-Latin-1 but Latin characters in it ('č' and 'ė', that is 'LATIN
SMALL LETTER C WITH CARON', U+010D, and 'LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DOT
ABOVE', U+0117).

Before, I had installed TeXGyre Termes as a font with groff for ps and
pdf (as family Termes). It (-f Termes) works well with -man, but with
-ms, the two characters are lost.

Is there any way to avoid -ms's special treatment of no longer so
special characters?  (I know it is a legacy system, but it would be
great if it could still be used.)


Relatedly, when using pdfroff, I noticed that even Latin-1 characters
like "ä" seem to be composed somehow.  Would it possible to get
pass-through of Unicode with pdfmark instead of the transliteration
("[:U]" für "Ü") with -mspdf)?  With -mom, this works rather
beautifully.


It is pretty probable I am missing something obvious, but I seem to be
unable to find even a reference to the character treatment in
groff_ms(7), and searching the web did not seem to turn up anything
relevant, either.


Grateful for any hint,
Best regards,

Bernhard