Re: Baffling accented glyphs issue

[Steve Izma]

On Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 04:47:02PM -0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> Subject: Baffling accented glyphs issue
> 
> chats_1 contains a single accented glyph (î).  The glyph is mangled
> in the ps output. chats_2 contains the same glyph plus an additional
> one (é).  Here, neither glyph is mangled in the output.  The same
> oddity occurs with the pdf driver and with -Tutf8.
> 
> Even more peculiar is that the introduction of *any* accented glyph
> into the source file (in addition to the originally mangled glyph),
> even one commented out at the end of the file, fixes the problem
> with the initial mangled glyph.  Try adding
> 
>   .\"ô
> 
> or similar to the end of chats_1 and processing it to see what I mean.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is new behaviour because I can't
> recall ever creating a document with only one accented glyph.

Hi Peter,

I've noticed this behaviour only lately myself. I think Bjarni's
explanation accounts for it.

But your email encoded the texts as iso-8859-1, not utf8, so when I
saved the file and ran it there wasn't a problem.

When I created my own file with the single accented character as
utf-8 I got the same problem as you indicated.

Using -K utf8 solves it. I guess I rarely have files with only a
single example of a utf-8 character. I use the utf-8 open and
closing double quotes very frequently so that probably makes the
difference to preconv.

        -- Steve

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Steve Izma
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