From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 18:53:37 +0000
From: Roman Czyborra czyborra@cs.tu-berlin.de
Subject: [9fans] unicoded troff?
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In Rob Pike's and Ken Thompson's 1993 Usenix paper "Hello World or
Καλημέρα κόσμε or こんにちは 世界"
which can be seen at http://pub.cs.tu-berlin.de/doc/unicode/09utf.ps.Z
and many other places as Postscript document and also in an ISO-8859-1
HTML version at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/doc/utf.html [isn't
the PostScript version anywhere on plan9.bell-labs.com?] I read that:

	Brian Kernighan suffered cheerfully with several inadequate
	implementations and converted troff to UTF. 

That sounds very interesting because that would turn troff into a
typesetter that can typeset Unicode text.

And indeed, if I look at the Postscript source I get to see that the
paper itself was formatted with troff, using the Symbol font for the
Greek letters and bitmaps for Japanese.

Hence I wonder:

Is there a running Plan9 host to which I may telnet and try it out? 

Or can I install Plan 9 on a PC whose harddisk is almost filled with a
big Linux and a small DOS partition?  What would that cost me in time,
money and disk space?  I did not see these questions answered in the
FAQ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/faq.html

Are the troff sources available and has anybody ported the Plan9 troff
to Unix yet?

groff, the GNU troff which does a great job at typesetting ISO-8859-1
texts, has unfortunately been abandoned by James Clark and seems too
hard to expand to more of the Unicode character repertoire.

Will I ever get to see Unix manual pages with mathematical symbols and
all the authors' names spelled correctly instead of in ASCII
approximations?

Gratefully, Roman http://czyborra.com/