Re: [9fans] unicode fonts in troff

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

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