[9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[Rudolf Sykora]

Hello,

I again bumped into this awkward topic.

Being Czech I need to write with quite a few accented characters.
Being a physicist I write some math, too, and I use unicode characters
often.

Plan9 as well as p9p troff is not set up for using accented characters
I need (above 0xff but below 0x1ff, such as ď, ě, ň, ř, š, ť, ů, ž) in
Times-Roman. It switches to LucidaSans for the range, which is pretty
bad. Using LucidaSans for all text is not an option. I need
Times-Roman (or some other serif font).

Had it not been for math, Heirloom troff would solve the problem
(knows unicode, typesets all the characters I need). However, for some
reason, it typesets math differently than when plan9 or p9p troff is
used. Basically, results from heirloom troff + heirloom eqn, or
heirloom troff + p9p eqn, are bad for some reason.

Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)

There is a type1 urw font NimbusRoNo9L, which is free, basically
Times-Roman, and has the characters I need. But I do not know
precisely what should be done to be able to use it. As it is, it seems
to be a type1 font, but with more than 255 glyphs, so I believe that
those for-me-interesting glyphs cannot be directly indexed. I read
somewhere they can only be used under their unicode names or what. If
this is true, I need to do something with the font, probably divide it
into two... Does anybody know more and can help?

Thank you!
Ruda

Re: [9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[tlaronde]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 04:44:31PM +0200, Rudolf Sykora wrote:
>
> Had it not been for math, Heirloom troff would solve the problem
> (knows unicode, typesets all the characters I need). However, for some
> reason, it typesets math differently than when plan9 or p9p troff is
> used. Basically, results from heirloom troff + heirloom eqn, or
> heirloom troff + p9p eqn, are bad for some reason.
>
> Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)
>

This is one reason why TeX is preferable, giving it all in one program.

The only problem---but circumventable---is that TeX by itself uses 256
characters for text (this is not the case for math: it uses more, and
that's why unicode via utf-8 is not unachievable without changing hugely
the engine), so one has to convert Unicode to some 8 bits encoding.

The type1 fonts (standard PostScript fonts) are available with the TeX
engine and with european encodings.

And there is TeX for Plan9 via kerTeX:

http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html

This is probably not the answer if the question is "how to do with troff
etc."; but this is an answer.

--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

Re: [9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[Pavel Klinkovsky]

> Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)
I have already "imported" some font to Plan9 troff containing Czech characters.
It is pretty boring work... ;)

But I think I can help you.

Pavel

Re: [9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[Rudolf Sykora]

On 3 September 2012 10:33, Pavel Klinkovsky <pavel.klinkovsky@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)
> I have already "imported" some font to Plan9 troff containing Czech characters.
> It is pretty boring work... ;)
>
> But I think I can help you.
>
> Pavel
>

That's nice to hear.
Also, started by my question here on 9fans, I had a longer private
discussion with Ali Gholami Rudi, who did yet another port of plan9
troff tools to linux, http://litcave.rudi.ir/. With this software,
after some small adjustments, it seems I'll be able to achieve what I
currently need --- prepare a Czech presentation (or I will switch to
latex/beamer for the moment).

In the future, however, I'd like to approach this problem again in
more details, so that it's solved for me hopefully for ever. I will
then ask what you can do /did.

Thanks for your answer!
Ruda