[9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Bence Fábián]

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Hi!

Is there anyone using troff in a language with exotic (non latin-1)
characters?
For me ő and ű renders poorly (they are slightly bigger than the surrunding
letters)
I tried most of the fonts in /sys/lib/troff/font but none of them works.

I can work around it with something like

\ds o \s-2ő\s0

but it's suboptimal.

-bence

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Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Rudolf Sykora]

On 6 November 2012 09:26, Bence Fábián <begnoc@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Is there anyone using troff in a language with exotic (non latin-1)
> characters?

Hello,

the situation in p9 troff is, in this respect and in my opinion, bad.
I guess that you are trying to use the default times font, but then
those accented characters are taken from LucidaSans as can be seen in
/usr/local/plan9/postscript/troff/R, e.g.

0x0000 0x00ff Times-Roman
0x0100 0x01ff LucidaSansUnicode01
0x0200 0x02ff LucidaSansUnicode02
...

which produces the result you describe and is simply wrong.
One way around is to use LucidaSans everywhere. But for longer texts
this just doesn't look nice (despite the fact that people from the p9
community use it in this way to write various documentation).

Another way is to switch to the Heirloom troff. It is more powerful,
though more complicated. On the other hand, I could not really use it,
because I use math a lot and any combination of heirlloom or p9(p) eqn
did not produce good output.

Yet another option is to use another port of p9 troff at
http://litcave.rudi.ir/
which was my way around when I was in a hurry. This software (being a
p9 port) allows you to use unicode characters in the source text,
however, it doesn't (afaik) build up the unicode coverage from several
fonts, but just one. When I used it you could use about 512
characters. But check this please yourself. (I guess that with the
help of Rudi, one could get the p9 troff to a better shape.)

Finally, some tidying-up, change and simplification should be done
withing p9 troff. However, it seems there is no manpower and/or ready
knowledge to do so.

Ruda

Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Rudolf Sykora]

What I wrote are actually options you have on linux...
(I more described p9p than p9.)
On p9 you have just one way, i.e., try and fix it somehow.
Which may be a lot of work if you do not have a good picture of the situation.

Ruda

On 6 November 2012 10:03, Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Bence Fábián]

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Thanks.

I'd like to use it under plan9 but sadly i don't have the knowhow.
Maybe someone smarter will fix it.

-bence


2012/11/6 Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com>

> What I wrote are actually options you have on linux...
> (I more described p9p than p9.)
> On p9 you have just one way, i.e., try and fix it somehow.
> Which may be a lot of work if you do not have a good picture of the
> situation.
>
> Ruda
>
> On 6 November 2012 10:03, Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
>
>

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Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Pavel Klinkovsky]

> I'd like to use it under plan9 but sadly i don't have the knowhow.
> Maybe someone smarter will fix it.

To allow the "special" characters (different from latin-1) in Plan9's troff you need to create tables of glyphs and the font metrics.

I have already made such a laborious conversion process when porting TTF containing czech characters to Plan9's troff.
Now I write the czech documents in Plan9's troff.

Pavel

Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[pmarin]

Can you describe the process or at least where did you get all the
info for doing this thing?

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Pavel Klinkovsky
<pavel.klinkovsky@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'd like to use it under plan9 but sadly i don't have the knowhow.
>> Maybe someone smarter will fix it.
>
> To allow the "special" characters (different from latin-1) in Plan9's troff you need to create tables of glyphs and the font metrics.
>
> I have already made such a laborious conversion process when porting TTF containing czech characters to Plan9's troff.
> Now I write the czech documents in Plan9's troff.
>
> Pavel
>

Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

[Pavel Klinkovsky]

> Can you describe the process or at least where did you get all the
>
> info for doing this thing?

I used the utility ttp2pt1:
http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/

Using this I generated sets of 256 glyphs and metrics, which I
manually copied into the troff and postscript directories in Plan9.

I must think more what precisely I did... ;)

Pavel