Re: [9fans] troff fonts with special characters

[Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com>]

Hello,

this starts to be daunting...

When I use troff with the R font, troff uses metrics from /sys/lib/troff/font/R.
Then something, when dpost -f is running, must take the real glyphs
and put them into the final ps.
I guess that something must read /sys/lib/postscript/troff/R to find
out that characters 0-0xFF are now from Times-Roman while above (at
least to 0x25FF) are from LucidaSansUnicodeXX (XX=01--25). Finally ps
is somehow generated (btw. there is no man page for neither
aux/tr2post, nor addpsfonts).

Now, if I want to add some characters which I miss in troff
(mathematics, like U27E8) while using Times-Roman for basic text, it
seems I have to
- find some font that covers my characters
- get the metrics (widths) of my characters (afm2troff.c for T1, some
other tool for TrueType, OpenType)
- add the metrics for troff (e.g. add characters to /sys/lib/troff/font/R)
- add an entry to the table in /sys/lib/postscript/troff/R saying the
name of the new font
- put the font somewhere where gs will find it
- find some bitmap font so that I can also see the characters on
screen, or produce such with ttf2subf
- prey :)

This, if it's really so, sounds really above my powers...
Am I wrong?

Thanks
Ruda