RE: [Groff] Help: male and female symbols?

[Ted Harding]

On 23-Feb-06 Robert Marks wrote:
> Does any of the fonts in the standard distributions of groff contain
> characters depicting the standard male and female symbols?
> (The circle with the oblique arrow above, and the circle with the cross
> below.)
> Inquiring minds would like to know.

No -- not in the Latin1 encoding for PostScript nor
in the Symbol font, nor in Zapf Dingbats (which is
not to say that they are absent from utf8 but that's
a different question).

However, they are simple enough that you can draw
your own, defining a ".char" object (which will
automatically scale with changes in font size).

Define two new characters
\[MS] for Male Symbol
\[FS] for Female symbol:

.char \[MS] \
\Z'\Z'\[ci]'\
\h'\w'\[ci]'u/13u*10u'\v'-\w'\[ci]'u/13u*10u'\
\D'l \w'\[ci]'u/3u -\w'\[ci]'u/3u'\
\Z'\D'l -\w'\[ci]'u/5u 0''\
\Z'\D'l 0 \w'\[ci]'u/5u'''\
\h'\w'\[ci]'u/5u*6u'
.char \[FS] \
\Z'\Z'\[ci]'\
\h'\w'\[ci]'u/2u'\
\Z'\D'l 0 \w'\[ci]'u/2u'\
\v'-\w'\[ci]'u/6u'\h'-\w'\[ci]'u/4u'\
\D'l \w'\[ci]'u/2u 0'''\h'\w'\[ci]'u'
.LP
\s[20]Male Symbol: MM\[MS]MM\s0
.sp
.LP
\s[20]Female Symbol: MM\[FS]MM\s0

(Using ms macrosm and enclosing the symbols
betweem "MM" and "MM" to show how they fit
into running text).

They look reasonable to me, but you can tweak the
metrics and motions to suit your own taste.

Hoping this helps,
Ted.

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Date: 24-Feb-06                                       Time: 22:05:48
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