Re: [Heirloom] Using the Symbola font in Heirloom troff

[Richard Morse]

Huh. I’m afraid I’m out of my depth then; you might check and see if your LC_* 
environment variables are set to something incompatible with utf-8 (or, maybe, 
check and make sure the file in UTF-8, not UCS-16 or something if you’re on 
Windows), but hopefully someone with more experience and knowledge will speak 
up…

Ricky

> On Aug 4, 2020, at 3:59 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> And if I add "and explicit unicode character reference \U'1F0A1'" to the
> file, that character doesn't show up either.
> 
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 2:47 PM Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> According to the Heirloom Troff manual, I think that you cannot just
>> insert Unicode characters (although maybe if your LC* environment variables
>> are set correctly, you can?). It says:
>> 
>>> Both nroff and troff allow references to specific Unicode characters
>> with the \U'X' escape sequence;
>>> it causes the character at position U+X to be printed (X is a
>> hexadecimal number). For troff,
>>> it is required that this character is available in one of the fonts
>> mounted at this point.
>>> As an example, \U'20AC' prints the Euro character €. When register .g is
>> set to 1 Unicode
>>> characters can also be accessed with \[uXXXX] where XXXX is a four digit
>> hexadecimal number.
>> 
>> So I think you would need to use `\U'1F0A1'` for the character to show up?
>> 
>> Ricky
>> 
>> 
>>> On Aug 4, 2020, at 12:28 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> (The heirloom-doctools README.md
>>> <https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/blob/master/README.md>
>> says
>>> to ask Heirloom doctools questions on this list.)
>>> 
>>> I'd like to use the Symbola font in Heirloom troff.   I tried the
>> following:
>>> 
>>> .do xflag 3
>>> .\" fp 5 Optima Optima-Regular ttf
>>> .fp 5 Symbola Symbola otf
>>> .LP
>>> Here is some normal text.
>>> .\" PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPACES is Unicode 0x1F0A1
>>> .ft Symbola
>>> 🂡 And some normal text. ❊
>>> .ft P
>>> More normal text.
>>> 
>>> That's a literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode character at the
>> start
>>> of the line between the two .ft requests.  That character does not show
>> up
>>> in the troff output, even through the EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER
>>> ASTERISK Unicode character at the end of the line *does* show up,
>>> as CPSuni274A where the CPS<name> outputs the character of that name.
>> The
>>> Symbola font is embedded in the PDF output (created from the PostScript
>>> output), and the text "And some normal text" and the EIGHT
>> TEARDROP-SPOKED
>>> PROPELLER ASTERISK Unicode character are in the Symbola font in the troff
>>> output.
>>> 
>>> However, if I manually add a CPSuni1F0A1 to the troff output, *that*
>> character
>>> *does* show up.
>>> 
>>> Any ideas as to why the literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode
>>> character in the document source is being ignored and not written to the
>>> troff output?
>>> 
>>> I actually have a document that needs to use the PLAYING CARD ACE OF
>> SPADES
>>> Unicode character.  The ultimate goal is to have the Symbola font used
>> as a
>>> fallback font, which should happen automatically in Heirloom troff, since
>>> it searches all the fonts when a font is missing a character, but I made
>>> the example use the Symbola font directly because that shows the problem
>>> directly.
>>> 
>>> --
>>> T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io