Re: [Groff] unicode support - where to compose?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> How much work would it be to hook into whatever system-wide printer  
> drivers there may be?

Uh, I've no idea.

> This is something I've been pondering for a while, and I don't even
> have a clue how gtroff figures out glyph widths (is there some
> communication between gtroff & the postprocessor?).

gtroff reads the metric files (in the devXXX directories) for the
given device and positions the glyphs accordingly.  The postprocessor
just translates the intermediate output file into device-specific
data -- no need to access the glyph metrics again.

> It would be nice to have access to all the TrueType and PostScript
> fonts installed on the system without having to build metric files
> and so forth.

This is virtually impossible IMHO.  You need a tight integration
between groff and the OS, making it highly system-specific.  For
example, compare this with XeTeX, a TeX implementation for Mac OS X
which uses the system fonts, and which is able to digest Unicode
natively, with full support for OpenType features.  While XeTeX can
digest other TeX files, it doesn't work the other way round if the
nifty OpenType extensions are used.

> If I were to poke at this, where would I start?

In case you really want to invest some time I suggest that you think
about an improved `make install' (or `make font-install') which checks
the system for fonts and calls FontForge, afmtodit, etc., to convert
them to something groff can understand (this is, PFA+AFM).  Today,
disk space is abundant, and fonts are rather small, so this is the
route to go I believe.


    Werner