Re: First impressions: strange groff default font behaviour after system upgrade

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Deri,

Here we go. In the meantime I came to the conclusion that the dpdviewer
is at fault, or rather the viewer's setup; I forwarded the pdf to a
different system, and there everything was visible as intended.

Best regards, and thank you!

Oliver.


On 18/12/2023 22:34, Deri wrote:
> On Monday, 18 December 2023 20:57:07 GMT Oliver Corff wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > today I upgraded my system from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39 which has the
> > appreciated side-effect that groff 1.23.0 is finally installed by default.
> >
> > I tested the new installation. As was to be expected, groffer was gone
> > (I liked it for q&d test runs of code snippets, so I actually miss it. I
> > wrote a small shell script to which calls groff and the pdf viewer, so
> > that is fair enough as a substitute).
> >
> > However, I was eager to see whether anything has changed on the font side.
> >
> > Under an out-of-the-box setup of my previous groff-1.22.4 installation
> > (delivered with Fedora 38), I could not print the characters  \[<=] and
> > \[>=]. Little crossed boxes appeared instead. My workaround then was
> >
> > .char ≤ \o'<_'
> >
> > which looks close enough to the glyph displayed by my system font for
> > the terminal, and goes well with a document typeset in Helvetica.
> >
> > On the other hand, Greek symbols for math and statistics, like Chi
> > Square, could be entered in the file as χ\~² and appeared quite as
> > expected. Without the spacing command, the north-east end of χ ends up
> > in the hook of the ².
> >
> > Enter groff 1.23.0. I compiled the same file again (a translation which
> > I had finished just this morning, not knowing what an escape I had*),
> > and alas! things took an unexpected course. First I looked for the
> > appearance of  ≤ and was astonished to see that not only was it
> > invisible, it was truly invisible as no placeholder box appeared; blank
> > space was there, at least. Then I noticed strange holes in the text ---
> > the Greek letters did not show up either. Again, no placeholder box,
> > just white space.
> >
> > So, this is a brand-new Fedora 39 installation with groff version
> > 1.23.0, the URW fonts being found in /usr/share/fons/urw-base35/.
> >
> > My first question: Is this new behaviour intended?
> >
> > If so, what I am I supposed to do?
> >
> > If not, what kind of tests and diagnostics should I conduct?
> >
> > If I compile a minimal ms document like
> >
> > .PP
> > 1≤2
> >
> > I can copy and paste the white space between 1 and 2 from the resulting
> > pdf document, and lo and behold, it is a "≤" !
> >
> > And, as a side-note, there is a typo in refer(1), right in the first
> > line(2) of ther first contiguous paragraph: "a preprocessor that
> > prepares bibilographic citations".
> >
> > As a second side-note, I am willing to learn. I discovered the
> > BUG-REPORT instruction. So for my next observation, I'll go to Savannah.
> >
> > Thank you a lot,
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Oliver.
> >
> > * I had to meet a deadline this morning, handing in my work just so-so
> > in time.
> Hi Oliver,
>
> Please could you provide a copy of the minimal ms pdf document run with the
> command:-
>
> groff -T pdf -ms -P-d -k
>
> And attach the download file from the font/devpdf directory along with an "ls"
> of that directory.
>
> This will let me start to see what is going on.
>
> You can either send them to me or attach it to a savannah bug report.
>
> Cheers
>
> Deri
--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
GERMANY
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de

0_Definitionen.roff
Description: Text Data

my_char.ms
Description: Text Data

my_char.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

download
Description: Text document

devpdf.txt
Description: Text document

urw-base35.txt
Description: Text document