Re: Greek and Russian in Groff

[Deri]

On Saturday, 25 March 2023 23:45:03 GMT G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Yes, indeed!  That works nicely.
> 
> I had tried this, which I would have thought was synonymous (apart from
> discarding output with '-z').
> 
> $ ./build/test-groff -k -mru -Tpdf -P -y -P U -z ATTIC/makhnovshchina.groff
> ru.tmac: Russian script unavailable; no glyph for U+0411
> 
> What am I missing?

Hi Branden,

Aah, the gropdf -yU flag is a bit misleading! It does switch gropdf to embed 
the URW fonts, but it has no effect on groff itself, so a call to .ft TR will 
cause troff to look at the default foundry troff font TR, which lacks the 
cyrillic glyphs which are defined in the U-TR font.

The special character "uxxxx" not defined message comes from troff when it is 
searching the TR font.

A little background. While writing gropdf talking to Werner about the best way 
to utilise the extra glyphs available in the newer versions of the URW fonts, 
he came up with the concept of defining foundries as a way of switching 
between two sets of compatible fonts. So I implemented the -y flag in gropdf, 
the equivalent -y flag for troff never got implemented so the only way to tell 
troff to use the U foundry is to use tricks such as -f U-T on groff command 
line, or .fam U-T or .ft U-TR in your document. Incidentally, using any of 
these "tricks" makes the use of -P-yU redundant since groff will pass the full 
font name "U-TR" in the groff_out(5) stream passed to gropdf.

Cheers 

Deri