[Groff] Re: Euro symbol in groff

[michael]

> My idea is to have two symbols: `Eu' and `eu'.  The former is the
> symbol in the `official' design; it should be part of a special font
> so that it is available identically for all fonts.  The latter denotes
> a font specific variant.

Are there actually font specific variants? AFAIK, the geometry of the
Euro symbol is specified in all details, so I was under the impression
that there won't be any font specific variants.  That's why I added it
as a new symbol, when I sent the patches back then.

> Now the nasty details.  For TTY devices, I'll add it to utf8 and HTML;
> distributions will then probably add the latin9 character set anyway,
> making it the default -- this isn't an issue IMHO.  Of course, \(eu =
> \(Eu on TTYs.

I would _really_ love to see TTY Latin9 support in the official groff
release besides Latin1.

> For PS, I'm not really sure how to proceed.  Adobe offers freely
> available PS fonts containing the Euro symbol.  Due to copyright
> restrictions I can't add it to the groff package.  Is there an
> alternative?

Not that I know of, but as I said, the design is well specified.  Anybody
who can make PostScript fonts should be able to make a one-character
Euro symbol font by converting the simple outline of a large scanned
Euro symbol back to vectors.  Ghostscript did that in earlier releases
to get free Times fonts, perhaps the author(s) can help out with this,
plus it would make a nice addition to ghostscript, too.  Until then I
suggest to distribute the result of the afmtodit conversion and an URL
where to get the Adobe font from Adobe.

Or do the unthinkable and simply ask Adobe for permission to distribute
the font under GPL. :)

Michael