Re: Re: PDF outline not capturing Cyrillic text

[Robin Haberkorn]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2024 at 01:39:51PM +0000, Deri wrote:
> Hi Robin,
> 
> The current gropdf (in the master branch) does support UTF-16BE for pdf 
> outlines (see attached pdf), but Branden has not released the other parts to 
> make it work! If you can compile and install the current git the applying the 
> attached patch should give you what you want.
> 
> To apply the patch, cd into the git groff directory and "patch -p1 < path-to-
> patch-file", and then run make and install as usual.
> 
> I would be very interested in how you get on, and whether it gives you what 
> you need. Note that I am assuming you are feeding groff a file in UTF-8 and 
> the -k flag. I can see some hyphenation happening, but I don't know if it is 
> correct.
> 
> Cheers 
> 
> Deri

Hello Deri!

This patch works. All the outline titles are correct and .pdfinfo /Title,
/Author etc. also work with Cyrillic.
That's very cool.
But it only works when using UTF-8 as the input encoding (-Kutf-8).
As reported earlier in the correponding Savannah ticket, even hyphenation
works with UTF-8 input and I see no difference to the hyphenation result
compared to KOI-8 input. I have no idea how you did this.
Still, when using UTF-8 input, there are problems (missing letters) with
link texts autogenerated by .pdfhref L.
With KOI-8 input, all the outlines are incomprehensible, ie. they consist of
крокозябры as it would be called in Russian. ;-)
Apparently gropdf does not know, it has to convert from KOI-8 instead of UTF-8.

So I am still going to disable the outlines for the time being and go with
KOI-8.
It's anyway more of a nice to have thing, rather than a necessity.
I need Russian support as I am writing my master's thesis in Russian.
At the end of the day, this will be printed, so I can live without
PDF outlines.

Best regards,
Robin

PS: And to comment on some of the heated discussions on this list:
It's great that you and Branden spend so much time on improving Groff.
I think, you do a great job. Regressions are sometimes unavoidable,
especially when taking over a large code base from somebody else.