Re: [Groff] Installing Russian Type-1 Fonts

[Anton Shepelev]

Werner LEMBERG:

> Please  don't hesitate to ask!  Ideally, you could
> then improve the documentation based on your ques-
> tions :-)

Thanks,  I  appreciate it. I thouhgt I'd jot a draft
document descirbing various aspects  of  setting  up
groff  for  a  specific language, that would include
dealing with encodings (UTF-8 and others) and fonts.
If  (when)  I  finish  it, that will indicate I have
gotten some understanding  and  then  I'll  consider
updating groff documentation.

> Well,  the  cmcyr  package  uses  the virtual font
> mechanism of TeX to combine cm with  cmcyr,  some-
> thing not available in groff.  However, groff sup-
> ports a fallback font mechanism instead.

Thanks for the idea. Currently I  have  switched  to
the  wonderful  PSCyr fonts, but the fallback mecha-
nism will allow me to use  CMCyr  as  well,  without
having to merge the Russian and English fonts.

> No.   It converts the input into GGL entities.  It
> completely  avoids  character  codes  larger  than
> 0x7E.

I  ran  my  file through preconv and the result con-
tained algorithmically derived glyphs  \[uXXXX]  for
Russian  letters, which, by definition, are not part
of the GGL.

But what to do with hyphenation?  With  8-bit  input
encodings it was simple -- just have the hyphenation
pattern and the hyphenation code definition files in
the  source  encoding -- provied the source encoding
characters fall into the allowed range --  but  what
to do with UTF-8?

I  naively  tried converting my WIN-1251 hyphenation
files (patters and hyphenation  codes)  into  UTF-8,
but groff wouldn't like it, saying:

    hyphenation code must be an ordinary character.

But I was just doing:

    .hcode <a> <a> <A> <a>

where  <a>  and <A> stand for a lower- and uppercase
Russian letter in UTF-8, respectively. What  hyphen-
ation codes should I use then?

Many thanks for you help,
Anton