[Groff] a couple of bugs with groff output

[Werner LEMBERG]

Dear gs maintainers,


consider the following input to groff:

  \[*a]\[lh]

This produces an alpha character followed by a left hand symbol.  The
interesting thing is that both glyphs are created using derived fonts.
The \[*a] is a slanted version of `alpha' in PS Symbol, the second is
a mirrored version of glyph `a12' in ZapfDingbats.  Attached is the PS
output from the forthcoming 1.18.2, but any version of groff will
exhibit the gs bugs.

No the list of problems:

  . gs 6.51 displays the PS file fine, gs 8.00 doesn't.  The latter
    incorrectly places the left hand symbol too far to the left.

  . ps2pdf from both gs 6.51 and 8.00 incorrectly rotate the whole
    page by 180 degrees.  As soon as you add a normal glyph to the
    groff source (e.g. `a\[*a]\[lh]'), this problem vanishes.

  . The ps2pdf script from gs 6.51 converts the glyph shapes of both
    \[*a] and \[lh] just fine, but it fails to position \[lh]
    correctly -- the result is the same as the PS output of gs 8.00.

  . The ps2pdf script from gs 8.00 is worse: It doesn't mirror glyph
    `a12' properly, and it double-slants the alpha glyph!

This is an amazing list of bugs for such a small input file, isn't it?
I don't have the recent gs 7.06 version for testing but I was told
that those bugs are still there.

Another unrelated problem:

  . The -dUseFlateCompression=false switch of ps2pdf in gs 8.00
    doesn't work; it makes no difference whether used or not.

If you need further info please contact me.


    Werner


PS: I wrote a bug report on 11 Mar 2003 with the title `PFB->PFA and
    overlong lines', but I never got a response.  Is this normal
    behaviour?